News Updates

A new report from the US Senate’s Joint Economic Committee documents a geographic “brain drain” in which highly educated adults are flowing to dynamic states with major metropolitan areas and leaving behind more rural and postindustrial states. As a route to help offset this shift, an official at a forward-looking investment firm recently described in Issues ways to encourage fledgling entrepreneurs to start technology-based companies in underserved areas and to foster their success.

Nearly three-quarters of women pursuing undergraduate degrees in physics in the United States said in a new survey that they had experienced some type of sexual harassment, and its lead author declared that “It’s really important for physicists to start talking about this—to understand what sexual harassment is, to recognize it and to speak up about it.” In Issues, the study director of a recent National Academies report on sexual harassment examined the problems—and possible ways to address them—across the larger academic science, engineering, and medical communities.

The US Navy is considering new guidelines for pilots and other personnel to report what are being called “unexplained aerial phenomena”—a change from the previously popular “unidentified flying objects”—in response to what it says are growing numbers of unknown, highly advanced aircraft intruding on military air space. But in Issues, a journalist recently took a skeptical look at the history of UFO sightings, concluding that “the Pentagon may well have its own good reason for keeping the UFO story alive.”

With the United States facing an increasingly technological future, a panel of experts recently examined the changing needs of employers, different models for training workers, and public policies that can help employers and workers alike adapt to emerging technologies. Issues has charted these waters as well, in a series of articles that reimagines the nation’s higher education system and worker training and another series that explores the future of work and the policy options that might help society successfully navigate this changing employment landscape.

Convincing vaccine-hesitant parents to immunize their children—a need magnified by recent measles outbreaks—will require addressing not just their scientific concerns but also their larger worries about risk and the role of experts in society, a philosopher recently argued in Issues. Now, a pediatrician offers a personal call, exploring how these parents may have come to their opinions and suggesting that to change their minds, medical and science professionals might do best by remembering that “the best way to be heard is just to speak calmly, human being to human being.”

Often blamed for causing climate change, some major fossil fuel companies are now investing in early commercial efforts to remove heat-trapping carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere, in what some observers call an attempt to remain relevant and profitable in a warming world. The move makes sense. In Issues recently, two experts reviewed potential benefits of capturing carbon dioxide from the air—for permanent burial or other useful applications—and outlined several promising technological options.

Nuclear power is the best bet for providing carbon-free electricity and combating climate change, says an op-ed in the New York Times, but the United States and other countries aren’t expanding their nuclear capacity for two primary reasons: economics and fear. Issues has weighed in on both fronts, with an article (cited by the Times) offering a road map for US nuclear energy innovation and another reviewing what psychological research has learned about why fears of nuclear energy are so persistent.

Recently in Issues, the study director of a National Academies report on sexual harassment of women in academic science, engineering, and medicine surveyed the scope and nature of the problems and offered broad approaches for addressing them. Now, a group of Democrats in the Senate, citing the report, have built on companion efforts in the House to introduce a bill that would fund research on sexual harassment in the sciences, direct federal agencies to coordinate on reducing harassment, and help universities update their professional standards of conduct.

The Trump administration and Democrats in Congress appear ready to consider hiking the federal fuel tax to help pay for building and maintaining the nation’s roads and bridges. But there may be a better option. In Issues, an engineer who studies technological change argues that charging motorists by the miles they travel, not when they fill their tanks, would be a fair way of raising needed funds that better fits the changing face of automobiles and driving habits.

The National Academy of Sciences has started a voting process asking its members to allow sexual harassers to be expelled from their ranks. The move follows a major NAS report on sexual harassment and gender discrimination. In Issues, the report’s study director described the pervasive and pernicious ways in which sexual harassment harms researchers and the research environment, concluding that the research community must “start treating sexual harassment as a violation of responsible research conduct.”

As some health professionals see a benefit in genetically testing patients to aid in prescribing drugs for depression, many others, as well as the US Food and Drug Administration, remain skeptical, even seeing potential for harm. And on a broader scale, a scholar of anthropology and genetics recently argued in Issues that such “precision medicine”—tailoring treatments for both mental and physical disorders based on genetic testing—is doomed to fail, and that pursing this scientific mirage may misdirect vital resources from more fruitful areas of research.