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• February 7, 2023

  Episode 25: What’s Driving the Electric Car Revival?

  Matthew N. Eisler, Jason Lloyd

  In 2022, there were more than 2 million electric vehicles, or EVs, on the road in the United States. In 2005, there were only about 1,000. The conventional wisdom credits better batteries… Read More

• Fall 2021

  “Science and Technology Now Sit in the Center of Every Policy and Social Issue”

  Alondra Nelson, William Kearney

  In January 2021, President Biden appointed sociologist Alondra Nelson, a leading scholar of science, technology, medicine, and social inequality, to be the first deputy director for science and society in the White… Read More

• August 27, 2024

  Cool Ideas for a Long Hot Summer: Solar-Powered Canoes

  David Manuel-Navarrete, Kimberly Quach

  In our new 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… Read More

• Fall 2025

  How “Archive” Became a Verb

  Amelia Acker

  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.

• Fall 2023

  New Voices on the Hill

  Yadira Caraveo, Jen Kiggans, Eric Sorensen, Brandon Williams

  Yadira Caraveo Congresswoman Yadira Caraveo. Illustration by Shonagh Rae. Congresswoman Yadira Caraveo, MD (D-CO) is a pediatrician and previously served in the Colorado state legislature. She represents Colorado’s Eighth (and newest) Congressional… Read More

• Fall 2023

  “How Does This Country Do Big Things?”

  Arati Prabhakar, Lisa Margonelli

  Engineer and applied physicist Arati Prabhakar is the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and—as assistant to the president for science and technology—is part of President… Read More

• Fall 2022

  Collaboration on the Mudflats

  David D. Hart, Bridie McGreavy, Anthony Sutton, Gabrielle V. Hillyer, Darren J. Ranco

  We began in 2006 as a group of researchers at the University of Maine who were trying to align our work with the needs of communities. Motivated in part by frustration with the… Read More

• Summer 2019

  Artificial Intelligence for a Social World

  Justine Cassell

  Will artificial intelligence (AI) mean the end of social interaction? I want to say right away—so that you can stop reading if this disappoints you—that I’m not going to answer that question.… Read More

• Spring 2024

  Embracing the Social in Social Science

  Rayvon Fouché

  To begin thinking about why all the sciences should embrace the social in social science, I would like to start with cupcakes. In my research, context is a recurring theme, so let… Read More

• December 21, 2021

  Episode 4: Art of a COVID Year

  In the early days of the pandemic, communities began singing together over balconies, banging pans, and engaging in other forms of collective support, release, and creativity. Artists have also been creatively responding… Read More

• Winter 2023

  The Complicated Legacy of Terry Wallis and His Brain Injury

  Joseph J. Fins

  illustration by Shonagh Rae In the eight years that I have been teaching a seminar on disability rights and brain injury at Yale Law School, I have never come close to tears. But last… Read More

• Spring 2023

  Viral Suppression

  Jack Stilgoe

  In November 2021, an investigative story in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) with the headline “Covid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial” received more… Read More

• Spring 2025

  Let Unfunded Grant Applications See the Light of Day

  Stuart Buck, Christopher Steven Marcum

  Showing which proposals do and don’t receive federal funding can improve research and advance open science.

• Fall 2025

  Three Months on the Way to FAIR

  Kelvin Droegemeier, Barbara Snyder, Toby Smith, Nancy Andrews, Willie May, Kurt Marek, Farin Kamangar

  When 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.

• June 24, 2024

  Preparing Researchers for an Era of Freer Information

  Peter W. B. Phillips

  If you Google my name along with “Monsanto,” you will find a series of allegations from 2013 that my scholarly work at the University of Saskatchewan, focused on technological change in the… Read More

• Fall 2020

  Debating Fish Pain

  Aaron Van Neste, Anne Berit Skiftesvik, Ben Diggles, Brian Key, Culum Brown, Deborah Brown, Howard I. Browman, Ila France Porcher, Ivan Darío Vargas Roncancio, J. Roger Jacobs, James D. Rose, John Sanbonmatsu, Lynne U. Sneddon, Monica Gagliano, Robert Arlinghaus, Steven J. Cooke, Stuart W. G. Derbyshire, Thomas Klefoth

  In “The Great Fish Pain Debate” (Issues, Summer 2010), Troy Vettese, Becca Franks, and Jennifer Jacquet rightly state that in Germany the assumption that fish feel pain resulted in court… Read More

• March 25, 2020

  Pandemic Science and Politics

  Daniel Sarewitz

  For the past 30 years, I have tried to make sense of the interactions between science and politics, especially the challenge of making decisions under conditions of uncertainty and disagreement. Why—despite huge… Read More

• Spring 2024

  Taking Aristotle to the Moon and Beyond

  G. Ryan Faith

  In 2009, journalist Tom Wolfe, author of the space-age classic The Right Stuff, wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times entitled “One Giant Leap to Nowhere.” Commenting on the… Read More

• September 24, 2024

  Lav Varshney Connects AI Research, Executive Policy, and Public Service

  Lav R. Varshney, Jason Lloyd

  In this installment of Science Policy IRL, host Jason Lloyd goes behind the scenes of the White House Fellowship program with Lav Varshney, associate professor of engineering, computer science, and… Read More

• Spring 2024

  “AI Is a Tool, and Its Values Are Human Values.”

  Fei-Fei Li, Sara Frueh

  Fei-Fei Li has been called the godmother of AI for her pioneering work in computer vision and image recognition. Li invented ImageNet, a foundational large-scale dataset that has contributed to key developments… Read More

• Fall 2020

  An Elusive Consensus

  Robert Cook-Deegan

  A few months into my medical training, I heard Fred Sanger, the Nobel prize-winning biochemist, describe a miracle—DNA sequencing in his lab—and Ray White, a pioneer in human genetics, excitedly reveal the… Read More

• Summer 2024

  Industrial Terroir Takes on the Yuck Factor

  Christy Spackman

  Illustration by Shonagh Rae Would you drink water you knew was made from your own poop or pee? What if that water showed up in a glass of award-winning beer? Perhaps you’ve… Read More

• Fall 2025

  Strengthening Science in the Long Term

  More robust public participation in science can yield political benefits, but—more importantly—it can improve science itself.

• September 3, 2024

  Cool Ideas for a Long, Hot Summer: Refugee Communication Networks

  Faheem Hussain, 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 2025

  “R&D” Means Something Different on Capitol Hill

  Sheril Kirshenbaum

  Scientists need to learn how information flows to congressional staffers—and the crucial role they play in setting policy.

• April 26, 2022

  Episode 13: Demystifying the Federal Budget

  How do budgets evolve into policies? As Congress starts to appropriate money for President Biden’s 2023 budget requests, we talk with Matt Hourihan, director of the R&D Budget and Policy Program… Read More

• Fall 2025

  A Brief Note From the Guy on the Table

  Robert Cook-Deegan

  A traumatic brain injury gave Robert Cook-Deegan a crash course in a medical research system tangled in technological dilemma and political paradox, a dysfunctional insurance bureaucracy, and the healing powers of superglue.

• Fall 2025

  Build Confidence in Science by Embracing Uncertainty Rather Than Chasing Reproducibility

  Anne L. Plant

  Despite 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.

• Spring 2025

  Who’s Afraid to Share Science in Their Listserv?

  Celinda Lake, Emily Garner

  An interview with Democratic pollsters on the chicken-and-egg challenges of keeping science in neutral political territory.

• Summer 2020

  Public Value Science

  Barry Bozeman

  STEF at 75 Why should the United States government support science? That question was apparently settled 75 years ago by Vannevar Bush in Science, the Endless Frontier: “Since health, well-being, and… Read More