News Updates

The National Institutes of Health has publicly apologized for its shortcomings in handling complaints of sexual harassment by grant recipients and staff members, citing problems highlighted in a recent National Academies report. Writing in Issues, the study director for the report described the pervasive ways that sexual harassment damages both researchers and the research environment, calling on the research community to start treating sexual harassment as a violation of responsible research conduct.

In a quintessential meshing of global space trends described in Issues, a spacecraft designed and built by a company in Israel recently blasted off atop a rocket owned by a US company on a long and winding trip to the moon. If successful, the innovative private mission will accomplish something that only governmental space agencies of three superpower nations have ever done—making a controlled landing on the lunar surface—and will do so at a fraction of the usual costs.

A Japanese space probe recently landed on a mineral-rich asteroid named Ryugu and will bring back samples to Earth, in what the project manager called “a first step toward resource mining in space.” In Issues, a group of US experts has explored the prospects for space mining, calling for new policies, informed by sound scientific and engineering principles, that will encourage commercial progress while ensuring equitable distribution of economic benefits and promoting the collective interest in maintaining the peaceful use of space.

Producing meat by growing animal cells in factories is often promoted as offering a climate benefit by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases that drive atmospheric warming. But a new study described here finds the picture less clear, with cultured meat production possibly driving up warming over the long term—yielding all the more reason why, as two scholars of emerging technologies recently noted in Issues, society should start thinking seriously about the full impact of industrially sourced hamburgers.

An experimental ship called Sea Hunter recently set a record by traveling from California to Hawaii and back again—with no humans on board to guide its way. Being developed for the US Navy to carry out “dull, dirty, or dangerous” missions such as submarine hunting, clearing mines, and long-term surveillance, it is among what a security analyst described in Issues as a new generation of surface and underwater robotic vessels designed to meet changing maritime warfare challenges.

Teams of researchers are working in caves and mines in the western United States and Canada to understand how bats might be affected during hibernation by a fungal disease that is killing the winged animals in other regions. But some critics, including a bat expert who has written in Issues about how bats are often wrongly blamed for spreading infectious diseases, say the work might do more harm than good while also wasting money that could be better spent on helping surviving bats recover and rebuild populations.

Defying a tweet from President Trump calling coal “an important part of our electricity generation mix,” the Tennessee Valley Authority will close two aging coal-fired power plants, saying they can no longer compete with plants using cheaper and cleaner energy sources. The decision effectively extends a timeline laid out recently in Issues showing that technological, social, and economic forces, rather than an alleged political war, have driven the nation’s century-long move away from coal.

In one innovative approach to reducing the effect of carbon dioxide emissions on climate change, a Swiss firm called Climeworks is building a network of machines to capture the gas directly from the atmosphere and use it for commercial purposes, including in making fizzy soft drinks. Along similar lines, two US researchers recently argued in Issues that viewing carbon dioxide as a waste similar to other social by-products such as sewage or trash might clear the path to an array of practical management options.

Some economists are now questioning whether robotics and artificial intelligence will inevitably lead to better jobs and higher pay, as previous emerging technologies have done, arguing instead that automation is rewarding a limited number of highly educated professionals while pushing many more workers into low-wage jobs with few chances to advance. In Issues, an analyst recently took a hard look at this conundrum, proposing that the way to tell if the new technologies will prove different is “by thinking more carefully about the jobs that will exist in the future and the education that will be needed to prepare for them.”

With California and Arizona fighting over how states should divvy up water from the drought-stricken Colorado River, the federal government announced that it might impose its own plan. But in what could prove a silver lining, a longtime water manager recently noted in Issues, in reviewing a book on the complexities of managing western rivers as they transition from an era of plenty to an era of scarcity, that conflict has often been a necessary precondition to compromise or investments in solutions. Stay tuned.

The US military is renewing its interest in very small nuclear reactors for use on remote operating bases, says a news account on the Defense One website, going on to cite an Army study claiming that such innovation will also have “significant impact” on the nation’s commercial power industry. But in Issues, a trio of nuclear experts recently noted that the necessary characteristics of tiny reactors would render them unlikely to have “broad commercial desirability,” though the authors do see a possible modest role for the military in aiding the nuclear enterprise.