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200 Results Found for

• May 30, 2025

  The Limits of Heat Resilience

  How resilient to extreme heat can humans really be? Our bodies have a limit—and our response to climate change should reflect that.

• Fall 2024

  Who Is Responsible for AI Copyright Infringement?

  Michael P. Goodyear

  Twenty-one-year-old college student Shane hopes to write a song for his boyfriend. In the past, Shane would have had to wait for inspiration to strike, but now he can use generative artificial… Read More

• Winter 2021

  Natural Historians of the Industrial Landscape

  Julie Anand

  

  Hilla and Bernd Becher were a collaborative duo of German conceptual art photographers who profoundly changed the way artists saw the post-World War II landscape. For more than 40 years, they studied… Read More

• January 16, 2024

  Ground Truths Are Human Constructions

  Florian Jaton

  Artificial intelligence algorithms are human-made, cultural constructs, something I saw first-hand as a scholar and technician embedded with AI teams for 30 months. Among the many concrete practices and materials these algorithms… Read More

• January 16, 2024

  How Generative AI Endangers Cultural Narratives

  Jill Walker Rettberg

  Sometime last summer, I needed to install a new dryer in my home in Bergen, Norway. I opened a localized version of Google and typed a request for instructions in Norwegian. Everything… Read More

• October 8, 2024

  How the Octopus Got to the Senate

  Jennifer Jacquet, Lisa Margonelli

  Octopuses are famously smart: they can recognize individual humans, solve problems, and even keep gardens. They are also a popular food for humans: around 350,000 tons of octopus are caught worldwide each… Read More

• Fall 2024

  For a More Competitive US Research Enterprise, the Work Begins Now

  Marcia McNutt

  The US scientific enterprise has for decades been a juggernaut for innovation, economic growth, and lasting national security and prosperity. However, as the head of a premier US science organization, I am… Read More

• January 16, 2025

  How Can Science Fiction Help Design Better Science and Tech Policies?

  Careless algorithms, disaster refugees, computer girlfriends: Many predicaments of our time came to life in science fiction long before they became science reality. Fiction can be a tool to explore the consequences… Read More

• April 2, 2024

  This Eclipse Could Make You Cry–And Make New Scientists

  Douglas Duncan, Lisa Margonelli

  Douglas Duncan is an astronomer who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. He is also an eclipse fanatic. Since 1970, he has been to 11 total solar eclipses. When April 8, 2024,… Read More

• January 17, 2025

  The Wait

  When Emilia’s brother disappears, she turns to a government agency that tracks citizens’ locations in real time in order to protect them—only to realize that the agency’s real goal is to simply create an illusion of safety.

• 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

• Summer 2024

  Boosting Hardware Start-ups

  In “Letting Rocket Scientists Be Rocket Scientists: A New Model to Help Hardware Start-ups Scale” (Issues, Spring 2024), John Burer effectively highlights the challenges these companies face, particularly in the… Read More

• 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

• December 20, 2024

  The Trolley Solution

  What does it take to be a good educator? In Shiv Ramdas’s story, a creative writing professor competes for tenure against an AI—and forces us to consider what we really want from technology in the classroom.

• July 23, 2024

  Rashada Alexander Prepares the Next Generation of Science Policy Leaders

  Rashada Alexander, Lisa Margonelli

  Since 1973, the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) Science and Technology Policy Fellowship (STPF) has brought thousands of scientists and engineers into the policy world. The fellowship is a… Read More

• December 13, 2024

  A Healing at the Triple B Trophy Lodge

  What if you could create a clone of someone who has done you harm—and then kill it? When a skeptical journalist visits the cultish “kill therapy” retreat to profile its ambitious founder, she inadvertently opens the door to histories she had long endeavored to forget.

• November 22, 2024

  A Time Between

  Detectives digging into evidence of a tragic death find themselves confronted with two different versions of the past—and, perhaps, the present.

• Winter 2024

  A Scientific “Forced Marriage” Takes on the Mysteries of the Loop Current

  Virginia Gewin

  As it enters the Gulf of Mexico, the shape-shifting stream of tropical water known as the Loop Current passes between the Yucatan Peninsula to the west and Cuba to the east. When… Read More

• Summer 2023

  How to Investigate an Algorithm

  Meredith Broussard

  At the end of 2021, Sujin Kim was a senior at the University of Michigan. Eager to follow up her undergraduate political science studies with a PhD, Kim was applying to 15… Read More

• November 8, 2024

  Collateral Damage

  From the Future Tense Fiction archives: A short story from Justina Ireland about what happens when a robot is sent into combat alongside human soldiers.

• November 1, 2024

  Domestic Violence

  From the Future Tense Fiction archives: When an employee tells Kristen she can’t clock-in on time because her house is locking her inside, Kristen begins to suspect the problem runs deeper than a malfunctioning smart lock.

• October 25, 2024

  Patrons

  Cassidy McFadzean imagines extraterrestrials who selectively lift humans from Earth and transport them to a deep-space artists colony. As they do, the distant visitors, known as Patrons, dramatically shift the terrestrial communities where they touch down.

• October 4, 2024

  Empathy Hour

  From the Future Tense Fiction archives: A story about the aftermath of massive climate migration, and the use of deepfake technology to manufacture complacence.

• Spring 2024

  An Elusive and Indefinable Boundary

  Virginia Hanusik

  

  Seven years before the release of Silent Spring in 1962, marine biologist and writer Rachel Carson wrote The Edge of the Sea. Part field guide to the Atlantic seashore, part meditation on… Read More

• September 27, 2024

  Move Fast and Fake Things

  In a recent episode of the podcast Women at Warp, the hosts discussed their favorite episodes of the various Star Trek series in which the Holodeck—a fully immersive, interactive virtual reality… Read More

• Spring 2021

  Technoscientific Bodies

  Michael Sappol

  

  The sensory pathway and radio system, in Gerhard Venzmer et al., Hand- und Lehrbuch der Krankenpflege 1 (Stuttgart: Franckh’sche Verlag, 1938), pl. 10. Originally from Fritz Kahn, Das Leben des Menschen … Read More

• March 12, 2024

  Walter Valdivia Researches for the White House

  Walter D. Valdivia, Lisa Margonelli

  The Science Policy IRL series pulls back the curtain on who does what in science policy and how they shaped their career path. In previous episodes we’ve looked at the cosmology of… Read More

• Winter 2024

  Coping in an Era of Disentangled Research

  In “An Age of Disentangled Research?” (Issues, Fall 2023), Igor Martins and Sylvia Schwaag Serger raise interesting questions about the changing nature of international cooperation in science and about the… Read More

• Winter 2024

  In Plain Sight

  Maryann Feldman

  Community colleges are the workhorses of American higher education. They are what this book refers to as “the ‘hidden engines’ that can drive shared prosperity.” Community colleges are tied tightly to their… Read More

• January 24, 2024

  To Discourage Science Misconduct, Encourage “Delight of Discovery”

  Tom Burroughs

  A top research center, the Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, plans to retract or correct numerous scientific papers amid allegations that the authors falsified data by manipulating images. In Issues, the science… Read More