News Updates

The title says it all: The Gift of Global Talent. This book, by a leading business scholar and reviewed in Issues, argues that high-skilled immigrants are critical to US innovation and the economy. But the book’s author and the reviewer, a prominent scholar who previously critiqued the US immigration system, say federal policies are making it difficult for scientists and engineers to come to the United States to study or work. And as the latest hurdle, the Trump administration has proposed further restricting visas for skilled workers.

Efforts to develop drugs to “cure” Alzheimer’s have failed, so researchers in Seattle, with major federal funding, are starting anew “to really understand what’s happening at the very basic level of individual cells in the earliest stages” of the disease, says a neuropathologist on the team. Well and good. But in Issues, a philanthropy official called on science to look beyond “molecular, genetic, and cellular” details and focus on “the complexity of the aging brain in its biosocial context, a context that demands that the brain be understood as an evolving, complex, adaptive network.”

Even as wearing face masks to help prevent the spread of the new coronavirus gains scientific support, some people resist them, believing that “masks symbolize government overreach and a violation of personal liberty,” the Washington Post reports. Such conflict isn’t new. In Issues, a philosopher examined how negative opinions about vaccinations, climate change, and genetic engineering often bypass science and reflect deeper disagreements about the meaning of risk, the role of expertise in a democracy, and the power of economic forces, and he offered suggestions for overcoming such stalemates.

Believing they can protect students against the coronavirus, many universities are set to reopen this fall. But their plans “are so unrealistically optimistic that they border on delusional,” says the psychologist Laurence Steinberg, citing research showing that the way young people think and make decisions about risk-taking makes them prone to behaviors capable of defeating any safety precautions. What makes young people so reckless, he explained in Issues, is that their brains simply have not matured, a fact that raises challenges for decision-makers across society in dealing with this population.

“Older adults have been impacted tenfold by the virus, and it’s not going away,” an expert on aging says, noting that this group “tends to be the most isolated and forgotten across geography, income and social class.” An Issues online exclusive offers a plan to help, calling for health care professionals, social workers, and community leaders—backed by increased government and philanthropic funding—to act collaboratively to identify people at risk of isolation and loneliness, especially among underserved populations, and deliver broad-based care tailored to their health and social needs.

With US schools closed by the pandemic, distance learning has reportedly proved largely unsuccessful, with one problem being that current educational software does not adequately engage student interest. Yet when many schools reopen, they may again need to work distance learning into the mix. For help in fixing things, technology developers and educators might turn to ideas proposed in Issues by a social scientist whose work on artificial intelligence pinpoints ways to build friendlier software, such as by incorporating interactive characters—“virtual peers”—that students find naturally engaging.

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere just reached the highest level ever recorded, despite the economic bite of the coronavirus pandemic, prompting a geochemist keeping watch to declare: “The buildup of CO₂ is a bit like trash in a landfill. As we keep emitting, it keeps piling up.” Precisely. As researchers recently argued in Issues, carbon dioxide emissions that drive climate change can be treated as a waste management problem, and they proposed fixes that would not require drastic reductions in energy use, transformations in energy technologies, or changes in lifestyle.

Solar geoengineering—using technology to reflect a portion of sunlight back into space—may become necessary to limit climate change, says a onetime leader in the field, but “more research is needed to make anything akin to an informed deployment decision, and any process of moving toward deployment will be messy.” Issues has regularly followed these matters, exploring basic principles to guide research and decision-making, the importance of global collaboration, and the need to avoid vested interests among researchers and groups deploying geoengineering technologies.

How Americans view the protests set off by police killings of people of color is often rooted in their unconscious biases, says a psychologist who has long studied prejudice and racism, adding that academe could help find answers but often hasn’t looked at the right questions. In what might form a possible work agenda, a scholar of science and technology policy recently proposed in Issues that the scientific community speak out publicly on the hidden nature of bias, stop marginalizing minority researchers and the topics they pursue, and of course diversify its workforce.

Among the reasons behind the protests set off by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, people of color have long been angry about their disproportionate likelihood of being imprisoned, as “the rise of mass incarceration over the last half-century has turned imprisonment into a dominant feature of modern life for black Americans,” a New York Times article says. Issues has examined this dilemma in a special series that proposed ways to reduce the impact of mass incarceration on communities of color and shrink overall incarceration rates while still protecting the public.

Long feared by many people, bats are being newly demonized by claims that they passed the COVID-19 coronavirus to humans, perhaps through an intermediate wild animal. But the Wall Street Journal (here, paywalled) introduces bat fans, scientists, and laypeople alike, to experts who reject this theory and cite the critical role these winged mammals play as bug-eaters and crop pollinators. Going deeper, one longtime defender has laid out for Issues (here and here, and in a new webinar) the scientific reasons why bats shouldn’t be blamed for the pandemic and how human actions are more problematic.