News Updates

With a $5.7 million gift from the Simons Foundation, Spelman College will add 10 faculty members in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The historically Black college hopes this will enable it to double the number of graduates who eventually earn doctorates in these fields. Boosting Spelman—the nation’s top producer of Black women who go on to earn STEM doctorates—with this gift aligns with the argument that Freeman A. Hrabowski III and Peter H. Henderson offer in Issues. To expand underrepresented minority participation in science and engineering, they write, an immediate focus should be funding institutions already proven successful in graduating diverse students.

Nevada is pressing US nuclear regulators to officially kill long-troubled plans to establish a site at Yucca Mountain as a repository for radioactive waste from the nation’s nuclear power plants. This would effectively put an exclamation point on the government’s failure to develop acceptable long-term storage options. In this gap, Başak Saraç-Lesavre writes in Issues, private companies are building their own facilities for storing spent nuclear fuel for up to 40 years. But this shift, the author argues, gives citizens no “voice in defining what constitutes a desirable and morally defensible way to govern nuclear waste in the present and future.”

In describing hopes for the just-launched Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, a New York Times opinion columnist writes that the organization will draw a fundamental lesson—“make big, risky bets”—from its groundbreaking progenitor in the Defense Department’s DARPA. In Issues, Regina E. Dugan and Kaigham J. Gabriel, former DARPA leaders, describe how their new organization, Wellcome Leap, combines the strengths of this high-risk, high-reward model with the operational independence that philanthropy provides. In this way, they have built a worldwide network of scientists and engineers ready and able to challenge conventional wisdom and solve urgent global problems.

Hurricane Fiona recently hit Puerto Rico, bringing extreme rains that knocked out the island’s electric grid and left 3 million people without power. Following an earlier hurricane, Maria, that battered the island and its infrastructure, Thaddeus Miller, Mikhail Chester, and Tischa A. Muñoz-Erickson described in Issues the underlying social, ecological, technical, and institutional factors “that often seem to set infrastructure up for failure.” Problems will grow only worse with climate change and accompanying extreme weather events, the authors note. As a way forward, they offer lessons to help policymakers, infrastructure engineers, and institutional managers design, build, and maintain more resilient infrastructure systems.

The social media giant Meta is moving to control developers of virtual reality systems, the Washington Post reports, citing claims that the company is gaining unchecked power “to determine which software makers have a shot at economic success and which might stay in obscurity.” But Kevin Driscoll argues in Issues that such a push doesn’t reflect how early developers and consumers envisioned the internet, with people running local networks of personal computers and creating online communities at a grassroots level. Examining this early history, he writes, might offer “insights into how we might build healthier online communities that are more just, equitable, and inclusive.”

During the recent heat wave, California managed the daunting task of keeping consumers supplied with electricity, thanks in part to a new system of large-scale storage batteries that smoothed power flows and protected the electric grid. Indeed, a group of energy experts writing in Issues maintain that long-duration storage technologies, coupled with solar and wind electricity, hold particular promise for meeting society’s need for low-cost, sustainable, carbon-free power. Led by Sarah Kurtz, the authors outline an innovation and adoption strategy, including multidisciplinary R&D, regulatory openness, and financial incentives, to advance long-duration storge systems appropriate for electric grids across the world.

On the upcoming sixtieth anniversary of President Kennedy’s famous “We choose to go to the moon” speech, President Biden intends to reignite plans for a “Cancer Moonshot” to cut deaths from the disease by half within 25 years. But as Walter Valdivia contends in Issues, so-called moonshot programs raise questions about “whether these large commitments of public resources have generated proportionally large societal benefits. Are we better off with them? Are they even necessary?” Still, the author writes, the limited knowledge available does suggest some modest rules of thumb that policymakers can follow to wring the most from big bets on targeted R&D projects.

University researchers in New York are nearly ready to start sowing in the wild genetically engineered American chestnut trees, once widespread in Appalachian forests but nearly wiped out by an imported fungus. Gaining federal approval is now their biggest challenge. In Issues, the philosopher Evelyn Brister examines ecological, cultural, economic, and metaphysical aspects of such genetic restoration efforts. Critics raise valid points to be considered, she writes. But, she concludes, “it’s likely that maintaining healthy forests will require not only the use of genetic technologies to modify tree species, but also to control the pests that are killing them.”