Search Results

200 Results Found for

• Spring 2025

  Stop Neglecting Fungal Diseases

  Although fungal pathogens are evolving to become a greater danger to humans, fungal disease tests are often hard to get and unreliable.

• June 18, 2024

  Brent Blevins Makes Mars Policy in Congress

  Brent Blevins, Lisa Margonelli

  In this installment of Science Policy IRL, Lisa Margonelli goes behind the scenes of congressional policymaking with Brent Blevins. Blevins is a senior congressional staffer and staff director of the… Read More

• Fall 2024

  To Boost Energy Innovation, Pull Technologies Into the Market

  David M. Hart

  The future of the United States’ energy system is hotly contested. As Democratic and Republican candidates disagree about the implications of—and sometimes even the existence of—climate change, elected officials in both parties… Read More

• Spring 2024

  Channels for Arctic Diplomacy

  Nataliya Shok, Katherine Ginsbach

  Illustration by Shonagh Rae During the summer of 2016, in Russia’s arctic Yamal Peninsula, a heat wave resurfaced anthrax bacteria long buried in the permafrost. The bacteria then killed thousands of reindeer… Read More

• Fall 2024

  Second-Order Effects of Artificial Intelligence

  In “Governing AI With Intelligence” (Issues, Summer 2024), Urs Gasser provides an insightful survey on regulating artificial intelligence during a time of expanding development of a technology that has both… Read More

• August 8, 2025

  The Song Between Worlds

  On a future Mars overrun by wealthy tourists, a young explorer ventures out to hear an elusive Martian song vocalized by the long-time residents of the planet. But they quickly run up against what it really means to seek—and share—intangible cultural goods.

• Winter 2025

  To Build a Biorubber Industry on the Prairie

  Tim Dawsey

  Farmers and scientists are collaborating in Pittsburg, Kansas, to reinvigorate the local economy through biorubber production.

• Summer 2024

  The Power of Space Art

  One of the remarkable qualities of space art is its ability to amplify the mysterious intangibility of the cosmos (as with the late-nineteenth-century French artist Étienne Trouvelot) and at the same time… 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

  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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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.

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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.