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• October 22, 2024

  Uncovering Hidden Bias in Clinical Research

  Lisa Bero, Monya Baker

  Check the end of any recent study, and there will be a list of study funders and disclosures about competing interests. It’s important to know about potential biases in research, but this… 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 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

• June 13, 2025

  All That Burns Unseen

  When a government worker is charged with collecting data from the fire-ravaged community she grew up in, she gets help from an unexpected ally: a fire-fighting drone.

• 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

• May 16, 2023

  Episode 31: Race, Genetics, and a “Most Dangerous Myth”

  Ann Morning, Monya Baker

  The concept of distinct races came from European naturalists in the 1700s. It’s now recognized as a social construct, rather than a biological classification. Nonetheless, genetics researchers sometimes use race or ethnicity to… Read More

• May 30, 2025

  The Shade Technician

  In a heat-sieged city whose residents have become functionally nocturnal, an essential worker labors during the day to fix private shade structures designed to provide shelter from the grueling sun for anyone who can pay.

• Summer 2024

  How to Procure AI Systems That Respect Rights

  In 2002, my colleague Steve Schooner published a seminal paper that enumerated the numerous goals and constraints underpinning government procurement systems: competition, integrity, transparency, efficiency, customer satisfaction, best value, wealth distribution, risk… Read More

• Spring 2023

  Export Control as National Security Policy

  In 1909, as part of the Declaration of London on the Laws of Naval War, a group of nations produced a list of items we would today consider “dual use,” but at… Read More

• Fall 2024

  Lessons From Baltimore for Participatory Research

  Alvin Hathaway Sr.

  Alvin Hathaway Sr. explains what Baltimore’s African Ancestry Neuroscience Research Initiative needed to gain insight, influence, and credibility.

• April 10, 2025

  What IS Going On in Science Policy?

  The actions of the second Trump administration have caused disruption across the scientific enterprise. To what extent does the upheaval reflect the administration’s new ambitions for science policy? And how might this … Read More

• November 15, 2024

  Pulling New Energy Technologies Into the Market

  Lisa Margonelli

  In the next congressional session, Republicans will hold slim majorities in both the House and Senate. As they seek to advance their legislative priorities, energy policies will be high on the list.… 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

• March 28, 2025

  Computing Consciousness

  What is the connection between consciousness, computation, and complex systems?

• March 14, 2025

  When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis

  Robot, a disease-detecting drone, has been meticulously trained to gather public health data in hard-to-reach communities—and to use that data to stymie the spread of dangerous viruses. But when the public health authorities responsible for Robot are defunded, it’s forced to assemble a new team to keep its communities safe.

• Fall 2024

  The Puzzle of Pricing the Future

  R. David Simpson

  Liliana Doganova describes her book, Discounting the Future: The Ascendency of a Political Technology, as a study in the “historical sociology” of discounting. Discounting—determining what value to place on income in… Read More

• Spring 2024

  The Roots That Ward Off Disaster

  Samantha Montano

  Every summer I take my undergraduate emergency management students to Louisiana to learn about disasters in the Gulf. One of our most valuable experiences is volunteering with local organizations that are replanting… Read More

• February 28, 2025

  Mothering the Bay

  When a busy BART train suddenly screeches to a stop deep under the San Francisco Bay, passengers turn to personalized AI agents to understand what’s happened—but they begin to realize that those agents may obscure more than they illuminate.

• February 14, 2025

  Actually Naneen

  Shristi employs a robot nanny named Naneen to watch over her kids. As Naneen’s hardware and software ages, Shristi debates whether to replace the nanny with a newer model—and questions which parts of parenting she really wants to automate.

• November 14, 2023

  Quinn Spadola Develops Nanotechnology With Soft Power

  Quinn Spadola, Lisa Margonelli

  Since 1984, Issues in Science and Technology has been a journal for science policy—a space to discuss how to best use science for the benefit of society. But what is science policy,… 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

• 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.

• Summer 2024

  What We Talk About When We Talk About Impact

  David H. Guston

  When most people talk about “impact,” they often imagine one thing physically hitting another, for example, the impact of the meteorite that scientists think was responsible for killing off the dinosaurs—and leaving,… Read More

• Fall 2023

  What Ukraine Can Teach the World About Resilience and Civil Engineering

  Daniel Armanios, Jonas Skovrup Christensen, Andriy Tymoshenko

  When Russian airstrikes cut off water to 80% of Kyiv at the end of October 2022, utility workers were able to restore the flow within 24 hours. Against a steady barrage of… 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

• 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.

• February 14, 2024

  Alta Charo Considers Ethics for Stem Cells and CRISPR

  R. Alta Charo, Molly Galvin

  A lawyer and bioethicist by training, Alta Charo has decades of experience in helping to formulate and inform science policy on new and emerging technologies, including stem cells, cloning, CRISPR, and chimeras.… Read More

• 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.

• 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.

• Spring 2024

  The Science-Politics Power Struggle

  Helen Pearson

  Politicians often assume that “following the science” will help make choices more straightforward, public policy expert Geoff Mulgan writes in his book When Science Meets Power. “Yet my experience is that this… Read More