News Updates

Wuhan, a rapidly growing metropolis in central China that is prone to flooding, is well on its way to becoming a “sponge city,” featuring permeable pavements, grassy open spaces, and artificial wetlands that can absorb excessive rainfall for discharge after danger has passed. This approach aligns with ideas explored in Issues, including recent proposals for how the United States can upgrade its infrastructure to meet extreme weather events expected with climate change, and a still-timely look from two decades ago at how to control flooding by working with the forces of nature instead of trying to eliminate them.

Scientific institutions in the United States and elsewhere are trying to devise global safeguards regarding the use of new gene-editing technology in humans, partly in response to the unexpected announcement by a scientist in China that he had created the first genetically edited babies. Important groundwork for the latest policy discussions was laid during an international summit on the emerging gene-editing tools, held in December 2015, and a number of key participants summarized their presentations in a special section of Issues.

Portland, Oregon, is now the latest measles hotspot linked to parents’ refusal to vaccinate their children. Such outbreaks prompted the New York Times to call for a concerted campaign to promote vaccinations that would be “as bold and aggressive as the one being waged by the anti-vaccination contingent.” Highlighting the challenge, a philosopher who studies public scientific controversies recently laid out in Issues the difficulty of changing parents’ minds, noting that their opinions about vaccines often bypass science and reflect deep social disagreements about risk and the role of experts.

In a look at emerging trends in space activities, an analyst recently noted in Issues that the growing number of private companies involved promised expanding innovations. So file this bit of news under Be careful what you wish for: a fellow in Russia has founded a start-up to promote space advertising that will use swarms of tiny satellites to light up corporate banners visible to all earthlings below. Just what we need.

Even though the US Supreme Court has ruled that juvenile offenders should not be sentenced to life in prison without parole, except in the most extreme cases, some states are still keeping many young lifers locked up. The high court acted in part on research showing that the brains of young people are not fully developed, making them likelier to act recklessly but capable of rehabilitation—a case argued in Issues by a neuroscientist who helped chart the timeline of adolescent brain development.

Investing in measures to prevent damage from natural disasters such as hurricanes has been shown to save money in the long run, yet the United States continues to focus primarily on after-the-fact recovery efforts. In Issues, experts have offered detailed proposals for ways to switch attention from recovery to mitigation, including upgrading the resiliency of infrastructure systems and better aligning political and social decision-making with scientific evidence on climate change and rising sea levels.

Soon after the debut of laboratory-grown hamburgers, two scholars of sustainable engineering argued in Issues that society needed to start “thinking about how factory-grown meat might transform our food system, the environment, and even our culture.” One challenge arising along the path from lab to market is what to call these new products, as Nebraska, a major beef producer, may soon become the second state, after Missouri, to regulate the term “meat” on product labels, pushed by farm groups wary of emerging alternatives.

The Trump administration says it plans to overhaul the visa system so that highly skilled workers from other countries can more easily pursue career options in the United States. A practical guide is already available, as a leading policy analyst has laid out in Issues a comprehensive set of reforms for the visa and immigration systems tailored to meet the nation’s scientific and engineering needs while protecting opportunities for US workers and students.

Facing recent setbacks, including deadly accidents and public protests, advocates of self-driving cars have joined in what they call an educational campaign to help “consumers and decision-makers understand the technology, its current state and its future potential.” Issues has taken several sharp looks at self-driving cars, with authors arguing that they should not be advanced in a hasty dash for commercial profit, and that new rules are needed to encourage their development while ensuring their safety and broad accessibility.

Not long ago, Issues examined how more countries and private industries are getting involved in an expanding range of space activities. Now ripening in Georgia, a nation at the intersection of Europe and Asia that bills itself as the birthplace of wine on Earth, are efforts to develop varieties of wine-friendly grapes suitable for growing in specialized gardens envisioned for human colonies on Mars—and early bets are on white wine for the red planet.

Soon after Congress took the tentative step of reauthorizing the National Flood Insurance Program through May 2019, the agency that runs the program announced that it would not issue or renew any policies during the government shutdown, throwing the real estate market into a tizzy. But even as legislators look for ways out of this drama, the fact remains that the program badly needs reform, as a decision-sciences expert wrote recently in Issues, proposing a set of improvements to make it more cost-effective, more equitable, and more appealing to property owners.