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• 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

• 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.

• 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.

• Winter 2026

  Sculpting The Floods

  Nathalie Miebach

  

  Nathalie Miebach explores how scientific data can be experienced through artistic processes, making the complexities of natural systems physically and emotionally perceptible.

• Winter 2026

  How I Learned to Conduct Research That Makes a Difference in the Lives of Arizona’s Kids

  Gabriel Q. Shaibi

  Gabriel Shaibi was trained to gather evidence about diabetes prevention. To have an impact, he learned to gather partners.

• Spring 2026

  What Do We Want From AI?

  John P. Nelson

  Public values must shape governance and implementation of artificial intelligence.

• Spring 2026

  Spam Policy and the Myth of the Ungovernable Internet

  Rebecca Coyne

  The story of feckless efforts to address spam in the early 2000s offers a cautionary tale for attempts to regulate artificial intelligence today.

• 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.

• Winter 2025

  Our Bases Are Precarious!

  Wilko Graf von Hardenberg

  Sea level rise has become a standard indicator of how humans are transforming the planet. But our ideas about sea level, why we measure it, and how it varies have changed radically over the centuries.

• 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 2023

  An Epic Battle Against Polluters

  Charles N. Herrick

  When we think about the evolution of environmental policy, many of us tend to imagine congressional committee wrangling, Sierra Club activists trying to out-hustle coal industry lobbyists, and competing policy briefs from… 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.

• 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

• 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.

• Winter 2026

  Getting Serious About Improving Biosafety

  If biotechnology is going to become a foundation of the nation’s economy, oversight must become more adaptive and collaborative.

• Spring 2026

  Constructing a New Knowledge Infrastructure

  Shannon Dosemagen, Gwen Ottinger

  An environmental knowledge commons could support evidence-based policymaking, but it will require long-term coordination across the many communities monitoring pollution and local conditions.

• Summer 2025

  If Your Snark Be a Boojum

  Readers respond to “The Strange New Politics of Science” by M. Anthony Mills and Price St. Clair.

• Fall 2025

  A New Direction for Research Universities

  As the relationship between society and academia changes, research universities must adapt to keep pace or risk becoming irrelevant.

• Summer 2023

  Enhancing Trust in Science

  In “Enhancing Trust in Science and Democracy in an Age of Misinformation” (Issues, Spring 2023), Marcia McNutt and Michael M. Crow encourage the scientific community to “embrace its vital role… Read More

• Winter 2026

  Lessons for Teaching Evolution

  The issue of teaching evolution in public schools is much more nuanced than a caricaturized “battle” between faith and science.

• Fall 2024

  Science Policy: No Longer an “Exotic Nice-to-Have Thing”

  Lisa Margonelli

  The community of people who do science policy has long been something of a cipher. In the late 1960s, journalist Dan Greenberg reported that it comprised a “remarkably small number of people”—he… Read More

• August 1, 2023

  Episode 34: Secretary Ernest Moniz on the Diplomatic Role of “Cumulative” Science

  Ernest J. Moniz, Lisa Margonelli

  Over the last 40 years, US and Chinese scientists at all levels have been engaged in broad-based diplomacy, publishing hundreds of thousands of scientific papers together. Recently, amid tensions between the two… Read More

• Fall 2024

  “You Learn More From Failure—When Things Are Not Working Well.”

  Katalin Karikó, Sara Frueh

  Katalin Karikó is a pioneer in research on messenger RNA (mRNA) and its medical possibilities, which were revealed on a global scale during the COVID-19 pandemic. With her colleague Drew Weissman, she… Read More

• Spring 2022

  “Try to Design an Approach to Making a Judgment; Don’t Just Go Into It Trusting Your Intuition.”

  Daniel Kahneman, Sara Frueh

  Cognitive psychologist Daniel Kahneman has spent his career studying the ways humans think, including the cognitive shortcuts and biases that shape—and sometimes misshape—our decisions. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics… Read More

• Summer 2025

  Building Decision Points Into Research’s Slipperiest Slopes

  John H. Evans, Craig Callender, Neal K. Devaraj, Farren J. Isaacs, Gregory E. Kaebnick

  The controversy around a ban on “mirror life” should lead to a more nuanced public conversation about how to manage the benefits and risks of precursor biotechnologies.

• Spring 2026

  A Science Funding System Beyond the Linear Model

  Heather Douglas

  To improve the relationship between science and the public, funders should embrace a new ontology of scientific work that aligns incentives with society’s goals.