News Updates

According to allegations in recent news reports, the Federal Bureau of Investigation recently considered buying a secret spyware tool that supposedly could hack any phone within the United States. In Issues, Ron Deibert maintains that such surveillance tools reflect a growing industry. “The industry markets itself as providing governments with the means to investigate serious matters of crime and terrorism,” he writes, “but left unchecked their products have become a convenient tool for undermining public accountability and political opposition.” As a corrective, Deibert proposes a set of policy measures, including “allowing victims of targeted espionage to hold both governments and companies accountable.”

To help make the US economy more competitive, the Biden administration is implementing new policies to attract international students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—the STEM fields—for academic training, along with an initiative to connect these students with domestic businesses. And just in time. As Gaurav Khanna writes in Issues, the past influx of foreign students—which has plateaued in recent years—fueled an expansion of the nation’s science and technology workforce, kept many universities financially afloat when funding lagged, and boosted local economies around college towns through student spending.

To curb climate change, roughly two-thirds of US states say nuclear energy can play an important role in reducing use of carbon-emitting fossil fuels, an Associated Press survey of energy policies finds. This support “could lead to the first expansion of nuclear reactor construction in the US in more than three decades.” But to expand, the nuclear power industry will need to fundamentally rethink its history and how it operates today, Jessica Lovering and Suzanne Hobbs Baker argue in Issues. The industry, they write, must embrace “not just new technological pathways, but also a more democratic, inclusive approach to how it does business.”

In order to avoid dangerous changes caused by a warming climate, it will be necessary not only to reduce new carbon dioxide emissions but also to remove carbon dioxide accumulated from past emissions, Evvan Morton and her colleagues write in Issues. To support carbon removal efforts, a trio of economists propose harnessing the power of markets. They call for governments or nongovernmental organizations to set a price on carbon removal, then commit billions of dollars to the cause, specifying how much they are willing to pay to private companies for a given amount of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere.

To ensure more equitable access, proposals from researchers competing to use the new James Webb Space Telescope will be evaluated using a process that focuses on their scientific merits rather than on who submitted them. Such an approach aligns with Lindy Elkins-Tanton’s argument in Issues. The United States, she writes, should restructure research funding away from today’s “hero model,” where the biggest names usually win out, and toward multidisciplinary teams suited for targeting society’s most vexing problems. Higher education, she adds, must also be restructured to produce a broader array of people prepared for more socially engaged science.

Under the latest National Defense Authorization Act, the Pentagon has established a new office to study what it calls unidentified aerial phenomena. But while some observers see this as an important step toward unraveling the mystery of what the public generally calls unidentified flying objects, others see it as the government’s continuing effort to control the real story. Keith Kloor might fall in the skeptic camp. In Issues, after reviewing the decades-long history of UFO sightings, he writes that “the Pentagon may well have its own good reason for keeping the UFO story alive. Not that they’d ever admit it.”