The Download: Flock’s new rules, cloning’s future, and children’s cells

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. The police-tech giant Flock is changing officers’ access to its nationwide network of license plate readers. The move comes amid a backlash over mass surveillance and reports of officers using the technology to stalk and harass current or former romantic partners.

To combat that, the company will require them to enter a criminal case number before searching its database and expand automated auditing of suspicious searches. But because Flock won’t verify those case numbers, officers could still find ways around the safeguards. Here’s what Flock is changing—and where loopholes remain.

This week I spoke to scientists who have found a way to turn male mouse embryos female. They’ve developed a CRISPR-based approach to essentially cut out the Y chromosome. It allowed them to create female clones of male mice.

They hope their approach could be helpful in conservation efforts, especially in cases where we might have only a few individuals of a species left. But cloning has multiple uses, ranging from genetically modifying livestock to recreating beloved pets and potentially even creating “brainless” replicas of humans. Find out what cloning can do now, and where it could lead next.

This story is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech newsletter. . In 2017, Deanne Taylor attended a presentation about the Human Cell Atlas, an ambitious attempt to map every cell in the human body. Taylor was floored, and then concerned.

The project’s researchers had only made plans to study adults. Taylor has since pushed the Human Cell Atlas to include children and is working on a major database of healthy pediatric tissue. The goal is to give researchers a baseline for how children develop—and potentially reveal how diseases that emerge in adulthood begin much earlier.