Edits to a cholesterol gene could stop the biggest killer on earth | The world's greatest toilet culture | Icelandic Fish Farm: Thousands of Escaped Salmon | College Degrees and Alumni Impact on Income

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� � � � � � Edits to a cholesterol gene could stop the biggest killer on earth - MIT Technology Review    In a first, a patient in New Zealand has undergone gene-editing to lower their cholesterol. It could be the beginning of new era in disease prevention. A volunteer in New Zealand has become the first person to undergo DNA editing in order to lower their blood cholesterol, a step that may foreshadow wide use of the technology to prevent heart attacks. The experiment, part of a clinical trial by the US biotechnology company Verve Therapeutics, involved injecting a version of the gene-editing tool CRISPR in order to modify a single letter of DNA in the patient’s liver cells. Continued here � � � � � � Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium The world's greatest toilet culture - The Economist    The protagonist of “Perfect Days”, a new film by Wim Wenders, a German director, is a Japanese sanitary worker. Each day he rises before dawn to clean public toilets in Tokyo. His job of scrubbing urinals and mopping floors is unalluring—yet the toilets are architectural wonders. One has transparent walls which turn opaque when its door is locked. Another is beautifully clad with wood planks. The domed white structure of one resembles a spaceship. Japan’s toilet culture is worthy of homage. The film features a real-life project by leading architects, such as Ando Tadao and Kuma Kengo, to renovate 17 public toilets in Tokyo’s Shibuya ward. Whereas toilets are often considered “dark, dirty and smelly”, says Yamada Akiko of the Nippon Foundation, which launched the project in 2018, “we wanted to transform that image.” The ubiquity of Tokyo’s loos is also impressive. London has 14 public toilets per 100,000 residents; Tokyo has 53. Their high-tech features are remarkable. Beyond heated seats and “washlets”, which spray water and blow air onto users, they include the oto-hime or “sound princess”, which makes flushing sounds to mask embarrassing noises. Maritomo, a commentator on Japanese toilets (who only uses one name), considers them symbolic of Japanese hospitality. Japanese and foreigners have long considered this lavatorial culture unique. Early European visitors marvelled at Japan’s proficiency in repurposing excrement as “night soil” fertiliser. In “In Praise of Shadows”, a 1933 essay on Japanese aesthetics, Tanizaki Junichiro declared the loo a “place for spiritual repose”. The greatest haiku poets got their best ideas there, he wrote. Continued here � � � � � � Thousands of salmon escaped an Icelandic fish farm. The impact could be deadly - the Guardian    Aquaculture is bringing jobs and money to rural regions, but a huge escape of farmed fish in August could devastate local salmon populations Clad in black waders, Guðmundur Hauker Jakobsson jumps into the River Blanda, whose freezing waters run down from the Hofsjökull glacier. Armed with a net, he casts around the ascending pools of the river’s fish “ladder”, built to aid wild salmon migrating up this powerful waterway from the sea. Within minutes, he pulls out a 15lb silver fish, which thrashes and writhes against the net, then another, then another – five in all. The wild salmon of the Blanda here in north-west Iceland are some of the largest and most athletic in a country where the rivers are considered among the world’s best. King Charles has fished for salmon here, as have David Beckham and Guy Ritchie; Eric Clapton is a regular. Continued here � � � � � � A college degree can boost your pay — but so can your alma mater. Here are top colleges for income. -     College is viewed by many economists — and parents — as key to securing a rewarding, well-paying job. New research now indicates that which college you attend can also have a lifelong impact on your earnings, with grads from top-ranked universities such as Princeton and MIT far out-earning the typical college grad.  By mid-career, or at least 10 years after their diploma, alums of Princeton and MIT received the highest salaries among all college grads, at almost $190,000 annually on average, according to a new analysis from PayScale. Meanwhile, college graduates between 25 and 64 years old earned median incomes of $74,154 last year, according to recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau.  Overall, the universities and colleges that lead to the best-paying careers after graduation are Ivy League colleges, technical universities such as MIT and private academies, PayScale said of its findings.  Continued here

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