News Updates

Putting the recent CHIPS and Science Act to work, the Biden administration will help fund at least two clusters of semiconductor manufacturing plants and related research-and-development facilities by 2030. In Issues, Sujai Shivakumar examines what such regional hubs can achieve—and offers some recommendations for their success. But expanding semiconductor clusters should be only part of what the author calls “an opening volley in an intense strategic global competition.” For the United States to thrive in this challenging environment, Shivakumar writes, will require “sustained attention and investment in research, technologies, and people.”

The face of nuclear power may be changing, due partly to university researchers who are developing new microreactors that may prove suitable for smaller communities, easier to build, and safer to operate. But to effectively capitalize on this potential, Jessica Lovering and Suzanne Hobbs Baker argue in Issues, the nuclear industry will need to undergo fundamental change, especially in some thorny nontechnical areas. The authors maintain, for example, that the industry must pay greater heed to public views about plant approval processes and siting and to the costs borne by communities near uranium mines and processing plants.

The Biden administration wants more funding for its “cancer moonshot,” but some experts are pushing back. Walter Valdivia likely would fall in the cautious camp. Do scientific moonshots pay off for society, he asks in Issues. “This simple and obvious question has received surprisingly little attention,” he answers. Current knowledge provides “no more than an informed intuition” that can mobilize political support for governmental research subsidies “but is certainly not sufficient to support big bets” on particular projects. For now, he sees some “modest rules of thumb” that can help policymakers get the most from amped investments.

Artificial intelligence is being employed to create “increasingly convincing” videos in the first use of so-called deepfake technology by a foreign government to undercut the United States, the New York Times reports. In Issues, Braden R. Allenby explores how such technological advances are combining with social forces to form “an emerging domain of asymmetric warfare that attacks the shared beliefs and values that support an adversary’s culture and resiliency.” The United States is especially vulnerable to such “weaponized narratives,” Allenby writes, calling on the nation to update its responses “for a new cultural and technological age.”

California is considering rules to allow use of large self-driving semitrucks, following claims that they would be more efficient and improve road safety. But labor unions are pushing first for a new law they say is needed to protect truckers’ jobs. For Steve Viscelli, focusing on truckers over technology makes sense. As he writes in Issues, government should prioritize policies that maximize the benefits of self-driving trucks to workers and communities, to avoid a trucking system “where humans are simply poorly paid attendants to robots, working in cramped and lonely conditions, with little sleep, and few prospects.”