News Updates

Laboratories around the world are pushing to develop a variety of gene-edited farm animals, though questions remain about their commercial future. Producers promote their potential advantages, but two researchers have argued in Issues that society should also consider the “ethical challenges of our relationships with animals” and recognize that even genetically altered animals are “living individuals that merit our serious moral consideration.”

Russia used every major social media platform to sway US voters during the 2016 presidential elections, and has continued working to support President Trump, says a sweeping new report. For some backstory, an Arizona-based scholar recently examined in Issues how nations or other groups can use advanced information technologies to drive “weaponized narratives” designed to undermine an adversary’s institutions, identity, and culture—and why the United States is particularly vulnerable to attack.

The number of monarch butterflies stopping this year at a prime California resting spot during their annual migration declined by 87% from last year, while a major way station in Texas may lose a huge chunk of its territory to the proposed border wall. Indeed, a leading expert on endangered species has argued in Issues that migratory creatures worldwide face an array of growing threats, including habitat destruction, overexploitation, and climate change, and that saving the great migrations is one of conservation’s most difficult challenges.

Two new Nobel laureates in chemistry say fears about genetically modified (GM) foods are overblown, adding that current regulations are preventing society from fully benefiting from the technology and should be “loosened up.” In Issues, two experts in the field, including the founding director of the Office of Biotechnology at the US Food and Drug Administration, have also made this case, arguing that many GM plants and animals “are subject to discriminatory, excessive, burdensome, and costly regulation” and that effective, science-based, and easier-to-apply regulatory alternatives are available.

The Environmental Protection Agency is forecasting that despite a Trump administration regulatory rollback aimed at making coal-fired power plants easier to build, no new plants will be built in the United States, primarily because of the ready availability of cheap natural gas. This prediction aligns with a century-long timeline presented recently in Issues showing how economic, technological, and social forces, not political factors, have combined to drive down the nation’s reliance on coal as an energy resource.

“The three of us working on space projects, we can do it for a fraction of the price that governments can do it,” Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Galactic who hopes to send astronauts into space by Christmas, recently said about himself; Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and chief executive of Tesla; and Jeff Bezos, the founder of the space technology company Blue Origin and head of Amazon. The efforts of these “space barons” were recently recounted in a book review in Issues, which has also examined how private industries are reshaping traditional government-led space programs.

Families now provide the overwhelming majority of care for older people with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, and a team of researchers says such caregiving should be underpinned by expanded community-based support systems. Issues recently examined the practical improvements that have been made in caring for people with dementia—even as biomedical advances have lagged—and also the need to refocus research to look at the aging brain as a complex network that operates within a rich biosocial environment.

As the congressional term winds down, prospects for passing prison reform legislation are dimming under bickering in the Senate. If any more motivation for reform is needed, policy-makers might look at a recent Issues series on mass incarceration that, among other things, identified ways to shrink the locked-up population while still protecting the public and to help released inmates reenter society.