News Updates

The Massachusetts-based company Commonwealth Fusion Systems has announced plans to build what it calls the world’s first commercial fusion power plant. To be built in Virginia, the plant is projected to go operational in the early 2030s. A promising prospect, to be sure. But Michael Ford argues in Issues that such private ventures will not be enough to address the varied challenges still surrounding this star-like energy source. The US government, he argues, should continue funding research at universities and national laboratories not only to answer key scientific unknowns but to foster a core future workforce and fully examine public security.

Google recently reported using a new type of semiconductor chip to overcome a key technical challenge in quantum computing, an important step toward making the technology commercially viable. But to fully capture the potential of this and other emerging quantum technologies, Sean Dudley and Marisa Brazil write in Issues, the United States must develop an appropriately skilled workforce. This national effort must range across high schools, community colleges, and universities, and be geared to produce a diverse universe of workers, including computer engineers and PhD scientists, technicians to manage daily operations, and nonspecialists for affiliated jobs arising as the field flourishes.

Every new administration brings with it a churn of new priorities and new personnel throughout the executive branch. This generally happens above the steady work of federal employees keeping government agencies and services running. But a recent US Supreme Court decision may prefigure deeper changes in how agencies operate. The court’s ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo ended four decades of Chevron deference—a policy of deferring to expert agencies when congressional statutes are ambiguous. 

Discussion of the court’s decision has focused on how it might affect regulatory agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency or the Food and Drug Administration. But, as Natalie B. Aviles argues in Issues, the end of Chevron could also reshape how federal science agencies such as the National Cancer Institute (NCI) do their work.

Aviles tells a fascinating story about the NCI’s development of a cancer vaccine, in which “scientist-bureaucrats leveraged the agency’s mission to create new policies and programs to help develop life-saving innovations and distribute them to populations in need.” She argues that limiting the NCI’s bureaucratic discretion could have real effects on how cancer breakthroughs are developed, and who is able to benefit from them.

Negotiators seeking the first legally binding treaty on global plastics pollution recently failed to reach agreement, deciding only to resume talks next year. But some students aren’t waiting. In Issues, two teams of college students taking part in the Biodesign Challenge describe their efforts to get at the problem by reducing the need for conventional petrochemical-based plastics or making them environmentally safer. With one team starting with agricultural byproducts such as molasses from sugar beets and the other with mushrooms and silkworm cocoons, they can produce practical consumer packaging that is more sustainable and easily biodegradable after use.