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• Fall 2021

  Run Uphill for a Tsunami, Downhill for a Landslide

  Lisa Busch, Robert Lempert, Max Izenberg, Annette Patton

  Historic Sitka, Alaska, a town of 9,000 residents, is located on an island southwest of the state capital of Juneau, in the heart of the Tongass National Forest. The Pacific Ocean borders … Read More

• January 4, 2022

  Episode 5: Dinosaurs!

  Caitlin Donahue Wylie, Jason Lloyd

  Caitlin Donahue Wylie discusses the role of fossil preparators in assembling the fossils on which knowledge of the prehistoric world is built.

• March 14, 2022

  Episode 10: Creating a “High-Minded Enterprise”: Vannevar Bush and Postwar Science Policy

  Vannevar Bush is a towering figure in US science and technology policy. A science adviser to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman during and after World War II, he mobilized the US research community… Read More

• November 22, 2021

  Episode 1: Science Policymakers’ Required Reading

  Every Monday afternoon, the Washington, DC, science policy community clicks open an email newsletter from the American Institute of Physics’ science policy news service, FYI, to learn what they’ve missed. We spoke… Read More

• February 14, 2022

  Episode 8: Fighting COVID with Art

  Because art is a powerful tool for connecting with communities, building stronger relationships between artists and public health programs may be a way to increase people’s confidence about vaccines. On this episode, cartoonist… Read More

• Spring 2023

  “If We Are Simply Creating Techies Who Can Only Work With the Technology, We’re in Big Trouble.”

  Freeman A. Hrabowski III, Sara Frueh

  Mathematician and educator Freeman A. Hrabowski III has led groundbreaking efforts to increase diversity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields throughout his career. As president of the University of Maryland,… Read More

• January 17, 2022

  Episode 6: The Marvelous and the Mundane

  The James Webb Space Telescope is expected to reveal secrets of every phase of cosmic history, going all the way back to the Big Bang. In this episode we talk with Washington,… Read More

• Fall 2022

  A Vision for Democratizing Government Data

  Julia Lane

  During the earliest weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a desperate need for data to respond to the worst labor market crisis in almost a century. State-administered unemployment claims skyrocketed. Jobseekers,… Read More

• October 28, 2025

  Not Now, But Soon: Losing Your Country

  Nasir Andisha, Malka Older

  Nasir Andisha, ambassador and permanent representative of Afghanistan to the United Nations, shares the story of what it’s like to lose his nation, but continue to advocate for its people. 

• Winter 2020

  Forum – Winter 2020

  Kenneth Prewitt, Gregory F. Nemet, Martin Kenney, Brent Goldfarb, David A. Kirsch, Carlota Perez, Stéphane Bermon, Jonathan Taylor, Doriane Coleman, Bruce Kidd, Joanna Harper, Joshua D. Safer, Jaime Kucinskas, Ronald E. Purser, Nathan A. Schachtman, David Zaruk, L. Val Giddings, Robert E. Tarone, David Kriebel, Nason Maani Hessari, Rogers M. Smith, Adam Gamoran, Sandra Lapointe, Peter D. Blair, M. Anthony Mills, E. A. Graffy, Richard Sclove, Sonia Livingstone, Anna Goldstein, Carol Farbotko, Erin J. Nash, Beth Ann Hockey

  Combatting tech hype We enjoyed Jeffrey Funk’s “What’s Behind Technological Hype?” (Issues, Fall 2019). However, as authors of a recent book on financial speculation arising from the commercialization of new… Read More

• Summer 2020

  Forum – Summer 2020

  Gerhard Sonnert, Adam Parris, Steve Fuller, Heather Douglas, Christopher Newfield, Marcy Darnovsky, Jonathan Lewis, Duncan McLaren, Karl Zimmerer, Alex Smith, Netra Chhetri, Roger Stoffregen, John Aubrey Douglass, Valerie K. Haftel, Emmanuel K. Peprah Jr., Stephen Posner, David W. Cash, Peat Leith, Sue Rosser, James Robert Brown, Molly Carnes, Clifton A. Poodry, Norman G. Lederman, Michiel Van Oudheusden, Fabien Medvecky, Stevienna de Saille, Michael Feuer

  Cutting carbon Carbon capture and sequestration technologies will play an essential role in climate change mitigation, so it is not surprising that California’s plan for achieving negative emissions, described by Roger D.… Read More

• Winter 2023

  How Would You Defend the Planet From Asteroids?

  Mahmud Farooque, Jason L. Kessler

  On September 26, 2022, NASA successfully smashed a spacecraft into a tiny asteroid named Dimorphos, altering its orbit. Although it was 6.8 million miles from Earth, the Double Asteroid Redirect Test … Read More

• Fall 2025

  Of Pandas and Science Curricula

  Monya Baker

  Twenty 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?

• February 27, 2024

  Building Community in the Bayou 

  Monique Verdin, J. D. Talasek

  At the age of 19, Monique Verdin picked up a camera and began documenting the lives of her relatives in the Mississippi Delta. Little did she know that she would spend the… Read More

• November 5, 2024

  Ending Inequities in Health Care

  Georges Benjamin, Sara Frueh

  The United States spends more on health care than any other high-income country, yet we have some of the worst population health outcomes. Our health care system is designed in such a… Read More

• Fall 2017

  Forum – Fall 2017

  Howard Gobstein, Naomi Oreskes, Wendell Wallach, Stephan Lewandowsky, James S. Risbey, Jonathan Gilligan, Jesse Reynolds, Arturo Casadevall, Ferric C. Fang, Stuart Firestein, Camille Crittenden, Lorne Whitehead, Matthew J. Kotchen, Stephen Hilgartner, William A. Powell, Christine Biermann, Clare Palmer, Peter Sandøe, Sarah Rovito

  Are cops on the science beat? In “The Science Police” (Issues, Summer 2017), Keith Kloor alleges that self-appointed sheriffs in the scientific community are censoring or preventing research showing that… Read More

• Summer 2025

  What We Don’t Know About Public Perceptions of Science

  Erica Palma Kimmerling, Eve Klein

  The Trump administration’s overhaul of federal science policy will impact all Americans. What does the public think about these changes to federal research budgets and policies?

• June 20, 2023

  Episode 33: Combating the “Multi-Dimensional Beast” of Chronic Pain

  Prasad Shirvalkar, Jason Lloyd

  Chronic pain, according to a 2023 study, affects more Americans than diabetes, depression, and hypertension. Yet the disease is poorly understood, often undiagnosed or misdiagnosed, and effective treatments are in short supply.… Read More

• Winter 2025

  “The Currency of Power Is Increasingly Becoming Science and Technology.”

  Darío Gil, Molly Galvin

  Chair of the National Science Board Darío Gil also leads IBM Research, one of the largest corporate labs in the world. He discusses how science is the new currency of power, the challenges in developing a STEM workforce, and the possibility of a “NATO of science and technology.”

• Winter 2024

  The Limits of Data

  C. Thi Nguyen

  Illustration by Shonagh Rae I once sat in a room with a bunch of machine learning folks who were developing creative artificial intelligence to make “good art.” I asked one researcher about… Read More

• Summer 2024

  “This Is Also a Time of Great Possibility and Great Capability.”

  Saul Perlmutter, Molly Galvin

  Astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter is best known for his groundbreaking discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating—for which he shares the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. But Perlmutter, a professor of… Read More

• November 3, 2022

  Episode 20: How to Fix the Bus

  Brian Sherlock, Lisa Margonelli

  Buses are an inexpensive and easy-to-deploy form of mass transit that could help reduce traffic congestion and curb air pollution. But in the United States, no one wants to ride them—and for… Read More

• June 18, 2024

  Brent Blevins Makes Mars Policy in Congress

  Brent Blevins, Lisa Margonelli

  In this installment of Science Policy IRL, Lisa Margonelli goes behind the scenes of congressional policymaking with Brent Blevins. Blevins is a senior congressional staffer and staff director of the… Read More

• Summer 2021

  Unmasking Scientific Expertise

  M. Anthony Mills

  In early February 1976, two cases of swine flu were discovered at Fort Dix in New Jersey. The Center for Disease Control identified the virus as Hsw1N1, similar to the one that… Read More

• Summer 2021

  “We Really Should Be Talking About an Ethics of Policymaking, Not Just the Bare-Knuckle Politics of Policymaking.”

  R. Alta Charo, William Kearney

  Illustration by Shonagh Rae From stem cells and cloning, to CRISPR and chimeras, lawyer and bioethicist R. Alta Charo has been a key player in informing policymakers and the public on the… Read More

• Winter 2025

  The Heart Is Not Neutral

  Adam Briggle

  In Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that justice is harmony and that injustice is faction—the disharmonies that tear society apart. The question, then, is how to hold a political community together. In… Read More

• September 10, 2024

  Cool Ideas for a Long, Hot Summer: Indigenous Sustainability

  Melissa K. Nelson, Kimberly Quach

  In our miniseries Cool Ideas for a Long, Hot Summer, we’re working with Arizona State University’s Global Futures Lab to highlight bold ideas about how to mitigate and adapt to climate… Read More

• Spring 2021

  COVID-19 Through Time

  Joseph J. Fins

  The only solid piece of scientific truth about which I feel totally confident is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature.  —Lewis Thomas In the spring 2020 pandemic surge in New York,… Read More

• August 20, 2024

  Cool Ideas for a Long Hot Summer: Environmental Justice

  Danae Hernandez-Cortes, Kimberly Quach

  This has been a record-breaking summer all over the world. Many cities have recorded their hottest days ever, and June 2024 was Earth’s hottest month on record. Mitigating and adapting to the… Read More

• Spring 2021

  Reimagining Nuclear Engineering

  Aditi Verma, Denia Djokić

  Since the first power reactors—Shippingport in the United States, Calder Hall in the United Kingdom, and Obninsk in the Soviet Union—were connected to electricity grids in the 1950s, nuclear energy has, in… Read More