News Updates

Companies founded by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson are nearly ready to punch the tickets of the first space tourists, starting with brief trips to the edge of space and then longer-lasting journeys into orbit. Issues has charted the progress, with a science and technology analyst describing here and here how new private companies are pushing government space agencies to work faster, cheaper, and with more imagination, and profiling the “space barons” set to reach their vision of lofting people—admittedly, rich people—far above normal earthly bounds.

New Jersey, which has the nation’s highest coronavirus-related death rate among prisoners, is considering legislation to free thousands of nonviolent inmates to tamp down infections, and New York lawmakers have been told during public hearings that “decarceration” is key to slowing COVID-19 in prisons. Making this case in the latest Issues, a team of doctors and researchers documented the disproportionate presence of COVID-19 infections and deaths in US prisons and jails, especially among disadvantaged populations, and highlighted the need—still often ignored—to speed decarceration.

Tesla chief executive Elon Musk just announced to much fanfare that his company will start testing fully self-driving cars “in a month or so” and that low-cost models will become available “about three years from now,” claiming their primary benefit will be greater safety over conventional cars. But analysts writing in Issues have concerns, noting that there is no general agreement on what “safe” means or how it should be measured, and that “selling” self-driving cars using a safety argument steers discussions of traffic safety away from useful alternative approaches.

“We find ongoing reports and incidents of the politicization of science, particularly the overriding of evidence and advice from public health officials and derision of government scientists, to be alarming,” two leaders in science and medicine said in a statement regarding the US response to the coronavirus pandemic, a day after President Trump said he might reject FDA’s proposed tighter standards for vaccines. Earlier in Issues, cosigners Marcia McNutt of the National Academy of Sciences and Victor Dzau of the National Academy of Medicine discussed (here and here) the crisis and how science and medicine can help meet its challenges.

Due to climate warming, hurricanes and other storms hitting the United States are becoming wetter, slower moving, and more destructive, some researchers say, citing increasing scientific evidence and pointing to Hurricane Sally’s recent pummeling of the Gulf Coast. This trend underscores ideas offered recently in Issues by researchers who noted how climate change is driving an “era of unprecedented weather events” capable of overwhelming infrastructure, including stormwater control systems, and they recommended ways to design and manage infrastructure that will be more resilient.

In what is called “a remarkable exit that will have far-reaching consequences,” General Electric, a world leader in the manufacture of coal-fired power plants, says it will no longer build them—this despite Trump administration efforts to pump up the coal industry. It seems a case of the handwriting being on the wall. As a longtime environmental consultant recently laid out in Issues, coal has been declining as a power source for the past century, driven by an array of technological, social, and economic forces that affect energy markets.

Russia is actively trying to disrupt the upcoming US elections to favor President Trump, the FBI director just told the House Homeland Security Committee, by using social media and other online platforms to sow “divisiveness and discord” among Americans, just as it did in 2016. In an early deep look at such malicious communication efforts, a scholar of emerging technologies described in Issues how foreign countries and groups were capitalizing on new online tools and services to spread “weaponized narratives” intended to undercut US institutions, culture, and resiliency.

Black scientists, who have long cited discrimination in training and working in academic and other research settings, now report being harassed when conducting field work, especially on environmental projects, with one botanist saying she was “quizzed by random strangers.” In Issues, a psychologist who studies prejudice and racial bias recently examined one consequence of the racism the researchers cite—a contraction in the range of scientific ideas studied and the information collected—and also offered a broader agenda for how the scientific community can help reduce US racial tensions.

A new report detailing how humanity’s footprint has intruded into the natural world and its wildlife populations notes that the resulting “spillover” of viruses from animals into humans—the reputed source of the coronavirus pandemic—is increasingly common and should be viewed as “an SOS signal for the human enterprise.” In an Issues online exclusive and webinar, a conservation scientist has proposed ways to fight such environmental destruction and the spread of animal-borne diseases, including forming a global organization to spot and stop the riskiest human practices.

NASA says it wants private companies to collect rocks and dirt on the moon, then sell them to the agency to help in developing “norms of behavior” for future space mining and astronaut bases on Mars. But not to be overlooked in the technological excitement is the need to keep both Earth and other celestial bodies safe from microbial contamination carried in either direction by humans or their equipment, an analyst recently pointed out in an Issues online exclusive, offering a set of principles for improving the nation’s current approach to planetary protection.

Apple and Google are collaborating on a system that will let public health agencies alert people by smartphone when they might have had significant contact with someone with COVID-19—and for those who go on to test positive, their close contacts may get a notification as well. But such systems raise questions of personal privacy, a molecular biologist noted in an Issues online exclusive, cautioning that they “set a significant precedent for normalizing mass surveillance and integrating digital and biological surveillance tools into daily life” and thus deserve close public attention.