News Updates

After progressively bad years leading to a record-poor 2020, an encouraging number of Western monarch butterflies are now returning to their wintering sites in coastal California from their annual northward migration. But the showy fliers still face dangers—and they aren’t alone. In Issues, David S. Wilcove warns that a variety of migratory creatures worldwide face growing threats, including habitat destruction and climate change. To counter this troubling trend, he writes, government officials and scientists will need to develop an array of new policies and technical tools, such as a standardized early-warning system to identify migrations at risk.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is now being fueled for launch, set for December 22. Once in orbit, it will study objects out to the edge of the visible universe. In Issues, the artist Timothy Makepeace presents a series of drawings he hopes will “convey some of the awe evoked by this engineering marvel.” They are rendered largely in charcoal, an ancient tool for drawing. “I’m using it to describe a tool for science that will be shot a million miles into space to help unlock some of the mysteries of our galaxy and the universe,” he writes. “It’s an interesting juxtaposition.”

The International Olympic Committee has revised its regulatory framework to allow greater participation in sports by women who genetically have higher levels of testosterone. The guidelines aren’t binding on other sports federations, but the committee urges the groups to consider similar action. This shift aligns with conclusions that Roger Pielke Jr. and Madeleine Pape offer in Issues, proposing what they call a “more inclusive approach” for classifying female athletes with genetic variations that will fairly allow their participation without undue “scrutiny and regulation of female bodies.”

Thick smog now shrouds India’s capital city, Delhi, causing school closures, construction shutdowns, and work-from-home restrictions on office personnel. Much of the pollution derives from area farmers burning rice straw left in fields following harvest. In Issues, Jon Hellin and Sudhanshu Singh examine factors that motivate farmers to burn their fields and how they might be encouraged to change. Rather than imposing penalties, the authors write, developing new technologies and economic policies can make it more profitable for farmers to adopt cleaner agricultural practices, diversify into other crops, and market rice straw for energy and food production, among other actions.

A centuries-old community on an island off South Carolina may soon need to relocate itself to avoid rising seawaters. And as climate change proceeds apace, a multidisciplinary group of researchers suggest in Issues, numerous other communities along coastlines and in other vulnerable areas will face the same prospect. To help, Kavitha Chintam and her colleagues write that the federal government must develop a coordinated and equitable approach to making such retreats manageable. One key part, the authors maintain, will be devising a permanent funding strategy that can help secure community cooperation and streamline the relocation process.

Under the new federal infrastructure bill, communities will receive major funding to improve safety for people who walk, bike, or use other nonautomotive means to get around. For some practical guidance, policymakers can look to ideas in Issues from researchers who used Philadelphia’s JFK Boulevard to study how safety methodologies can protect walkers, cyclists, and electric scooter riders on urban streets designed for cars. One key, Megan S. Ryerson and her colleagues write, is to shift from privileging the needs of automotive users to proactively and fully considering the experience and perspectives of cyclists, pedestrians, and other nonmotorists.

The newest Alzheimer’s drug isn’t reaching many patients, in part because of lingering doubts about whether it actually slows memory loss. The drug removes a sticky protein from the brain, and conventional theory held that this would slow cognitive decline. But proof remains elusive. And Susan Fitzpatrick sees an even broader problem. In Issues, she argues that focusing on this single theory has led science into a cul-de-sac. Instead, she writes, researchers should “start to look at 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.”

The newly enacted infrastructure bill allocates $7.5 to build a nationwide network of charging stations for electric vehicles. This reflects one of numerous actions that John D. Graham, Keith B. Belton, and Suri Xia recommend in Issues to speed public adoption of EVs. In a detailed plan, they call for new government policies to make the United States more competitive in manufacturing EVs and to make EVs more appealing to consumers. Toward these goals, they write, substantial federal support will be needed for technical research and development as well as social science studies to better understand how consumers make buying decisions.

Pfizer is close to introducing an easy-to-take pill that greatly reduces the chances of hospitalization and death in high-risk people infected with the COVID-19 virus. Among its distribution efforts, the company says it plans to license other firms to manufacture the pill to make it more widely available. This approach aligns with the argument Ken Shadlen makes in Issues, that licensing should be key in distributing drugs, including COVID vaccines. Indeed, he writes that “firms should be encouraged—and given specific incentives—to license and share their technologies widely, and to build large networks of licensees to manufacture and distribute at scale.”