Superglue for Fragmented Policy
A remarkable treatment for subdural hematomas involves, essentially, using superglue to repair the brain. The superglue procedure inspires the question of whether there exist analogous policy tools that could help fix systems that suffer from a lack of coordination: the health care bureaucracy, state and federal cannabis regulation, biosecurity, or artificial intelligence.
Editor's Journal
No Longer Free of Strings
Read MoreWhatever the future of federally funded science is, it’s no longer “free of strings,” as physicist Harvey Brooks described the relationship between government and scientific research. As the scientific enterprise tries to decide how to respond, it first needs to figure out what happened.
Forum
A Path Into the Bioeconomy
Read MoreWhy Should Taxpayers Care About Scientific Cooperation?
Read MoreDon’t Forget the Farmers
Read MoreA Difficult Act to Maintain
Read MoreThe Problem With Principles
Read MoreStill Unprepared for the Next Pandemic
Read MoreProgress and Pitfalls in Creating a Disaster Research Program
Read MoreInsuring a Risky World
Read MoreStrengthening Science in the Long Term
Read MoreA New Direction for Research Universities
Read More

Gallery
Tracing the Roots of Motion Capture
Perspectives
Build Confidence in Science by Embracing Uncertainty Rather Than Chasing Reproducibility
Read MoreDespite calls to fund reproducibility studies, resources would be better spent on developing tools that enable efficient collection and sharing of experimental protocol details and metadata to enable study comparisons.
Better Biosecurity for the Bioeconomy
Read MoreTo effectively prevent future biological threats, biosafety must be flexible, with engaged oversight over the entire research life cycle, and biosafety needs leadership and coordination from the top of the federal government.
A Coordinated Approach to Cannabis Policy and Product Safety
Read MoreThe United States urgently needs a coordinated approach to regulating the use of cannabis that prioritizes product safety and patient well-being.

Interview
“The Ability to Produce Is Just as Important as the Ability to Innovate.”

Gallery
Synthesizing Technology and Tradition
Real Numbers
Stony the Road We Trod: The Tradeoffs Universities Face in Chasing the R1 Designation
Read MoreAs America’s science enterprise is challenged to be more competitive with fewer resources, recognizing and supporting the research capacity of non-R1s offers a path toward a more dynamic innovation landscape.
Features
The Measured Body
Read MoreRedesigning motion capture systems to be more representative of real human bodies and movements could make them fairer and more useful for applications including law enforcement and medical diagnostics.
How “Archive” Became a Verb
Debates over a proposed national data center in the 1960s reveal how anxieties around privacy and digitization led to the shift toward corporate control of personal data.Of Pandas and Science Curricula
Read MoreTwenty years ago, a landmark court case held that intelligent design cannot be taught in science classrooms. What lessons does it offer for conflicts in education?
AI Companions Are Not Your Teen’s Friend
Read MoreDespite broad agreement that young people should be protected from threats posed by algorithms designed to act as friends, romantic partners, or therapists, federal regulation is dangerously limited.
Three Months on the Way to FAIR
Read MoreWhen the National Institutes of Health announced its intention to cap the indirect costs of research, an ad hoc group of organizations joined forces to develop a more transparent model.
A Strategy for Building Space Nuclear Systems That Fly
Read MoreNASA’s new directive to design, build, and deploy a nuclear reactor on the Moon by 2030 will require a commitment to implementation, leadership from the White House, and learning from six decades of failures.
Field Notes on Moving Focused Research Organizations Forward
Read MoreFour years ago, we founded a new kind of scientific organization to build fundamental technologies and accelerate discovery. Almost a dozen launches later, we have an idea of what works—and what doesn’t.
A Brief Note From the Guy on the Table
Coming Soon
Book Reviews

Beauty in Every Body
Read MoreAnatomy has long been recognized as a field at the crossroads of politics, medicine, crime, taboo, professionalism, modesty, racism, sexism, and much else. A new book goes beyond these issues in exploring anatomy’s past, asking if early anatomical illustration could have been a space for the exploration of homoerotic desire, hidden in plain sight.

Addiction Revisited
Coming Soon
Drawing the Great Hall
Read MoreVisitors are often astonished as they enter the gilded Great Hall, the focal point of the National Academy of Sciences building.