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• Spring 2024

  Harvesting Minnesota’s Wind Twice

  Ariel Kagan, Mike Reese

  The University of Minnesota West Central Research and Outreach Center (WCROC) is located in the city of Morris, in a region of the state where the winds howl across the plains of… 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

• May 21, 2024

  A Human Rights Framework for AI Research Worthy of Public Trust

  Mary L. Gray

  In 2014, researchers at Cornell University and Facebook joined forces for an experiment. They wanted to find out whether emotional contagion occurs on social media—whether the expressions of emotion showing up in… Read More

• May 7, 2024

  To Fix Health Misinformation, Think Beyond Fact Checking

  Tina Purnat, Elisabeth Wilhelm, Monya Baker

  When tackling the problem of misinformation, people often think first of content and its accuracy. But contering misinformation by fact-checking every erroneous or misleading claim traps organizations in an endless game of… Read More

• September 27, 2024

  Parasocial

  Monica Byrne envisions a future where celebrities can license their image—and their bodies—to an ambitious hologram start-up. The story dissects a novel legal and technological space, raising questions about what it means to sign away one’s image to the highest bidder.

• Winter 2024

  What the Energy Transition Means for Jobs

  In “When the Energy Transition Comes to Town” (Issues, Fall 2023), Jillian E. Miles, Christophe Combemale, and Valerie J. Karplus highlight critical challenges to transitioning US fossil fuel workers to… Read More

• Fall 2023

  How to Build Engineers for Life

  Idalis Villanueva Alarcón

  When I was six or seven years old, an elementary teacher asked me to write down what I wanted to be when I grew up. I listed three options: doctor, teacher, 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 2023

  A 40-Year Conversation

  Lisa Margonelli

  In the fall of 1984, National Academy of Sciences president Frank Press introduced the first copy of Issues in Science and Technology, writing that this magazine would be “dedicated to the… Read More

• Fall 2023

  Building a Culture of Risk-Taking

  Jennifer E. Gerbi

  Every day of my last seven years was filled with risk, and it was spectacular. I spent those years at the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E), where I was acting… Read More

• 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

• 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

• Winter 2024

  Lessons From a Decade of Philanthropy for Interdisciplinary Energy Research

  Evan S. Michelson, Isabella M. Gee

  In 2016, we at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation put out a request for proposals to advance research on the economics of energy efficiency. In response, a group of researchers from Western… Read More

• Spring 2023

  How to Keep Emerging Research Institutions From Slipping Through the Cracks

  Anna M. Quider, Gerald C. Blazey

  The CHIPS and Science Act, which became law in August 2022, is a major legislative accomplishment, reflecting bipartisan support to strengthen the US science and engineering enterprise. The legislation aims to bolster… Read More

• Spring 2023

  The Making of a Biosafety Officer 

  David Gillum

  The potential risks for accidents and misuse increase as biotechnology becomes more sophisticated, less expensive, and increasingly distributed. During my 28 years as a biosafety officer, I have dealt with laboratory explosions,… Read More

• Winter 2024

  How Health Data Integrity Can Earn Trust and Advance Health

  Jochen Lennerz, Nick Schneider, Karl Lauterbach

  Imagine a scenario in which Mary, an individual with a rare disease, has agreed to share her medical records for a research project aimed at finding better treatments for genetic disorders. Mary’s… Read More

• January 31, 2024

  Zach Pirtle Explores Ethics for Mars Landings

  Zach Pirtle, Lisa Margonelli

  NASA’s Artemis project aims to establish a long-term human presence on the moon—and then put astronauts on Mars. So in addition to designing rockets and spacesuits, NASA is also exploring the ethical… 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

• January 16, 2024

  Generative AI Is a Crisis for Copyright Law

  Kate Crawford, Jason Schultz

  Generative artificial intelligence is driving copyright into a crisis. More than a dozen copyright cases about AI were filed in the United States last year, up severalfold from all filings from 2020… Read More

• Summer 2023

  ARPA-H Could Offer Taxpayers a Fairer Shake

  Travis Whitfill, Mariana Mazzucato

  Years before the pandemic began, the US government was a major investor in what would become COVID-19 vaccines. It supplied nearly $350 million to build technologies crucial to mRNA vaccines. Later, as… Read More

• Summer 2023

  Innovation’s New Catechism

  Lisa Margonelli

  Since the mid-1970s, DARPA, the oft-copied Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has used a series of eight questions to steer investment decisions. What are you trying to do? Who cares? If you… Read More

• December 12, 2023

  Apurva Dave Builds Connections Between National Security and Climate

  Apurva Dave, Megan Nicholson

  Early in his career, Apurva Dave was an oceanographer; now he works at the cutting edge of climate policy at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. As the director of… Read More

• Fall 2023

  Inviting Millions Into the Era of Quantum Technologies

  Sean Dudley, Marisa Brazil

  Quantum technologies involving sensing, networking, and computing are beginning to transform areas as diverse as health, geology, astrophysics, materials science, and finance. Building on decades of work in theoretical and experimental quantum… Read More

• September 2, 2022

  Competing in the Twenty-First Century

  Innovation PolicyA New S&T Policy for a New Global RealityBruce R. Guile, Caroline S. WagnerGlobalized science and engineering capability has changed how innovation happens and who it benefits. US policies need to… Read More

• Fall 2023

  Fifty Years of Strategies for Equal Access to Graduate Fellowships

  Gisèle Muller-Parker, Jason Bourke

  The US Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina et al.… Read More

• Fall 2023

  Centering Equity and Inclusion in STEM

  As the United States seeks to tap every available resource for talent and innovation to keep pace with global competition, institutional leadership in building research capacity at historically Black colleges and universities… Read More

• January 10, 2023

  Episode 24: Collaborations on Ice

  Cy Keener, Ignatius Rigor, JD Talasek

  How can scientific data be made more tangible, visceral, and experiential? Collaboration! Over the course of a four-year project, Arctic Ice: A Visual Archive, artist Cy Keener, landscape researcher Justine … Read More

• Fall 2023

  Fairer Returns on Public Investments

  The US government has a strong track record of funding innovative health technologies, including the Human Genome Project, the Epi-Pen, prescription drugs, and lifesaving vaccines. In “ARPA-H Could Offer Taxpayers a Fairer… Read More

• Spring 2023

  Finding the “I” in Interdisciplinarity

  Annie Y. Patrick

  In 2015, the National Science Foundation launched an effort to spur what the federal agency called an “engineering education revolution.” The field had been teaching engineers the same way and drawing from… Read More

• June 15, 2022

  The Next 75 Years of Science Policy Collection

  Thank you for your interest in The Next 75 Years of Science Policy, a special collection from Issues in Science and Technology. We are no longer able to offer print… Read More