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200 Results Found for

• Spring 2022

  Electrifying Agents and the Power Thieves of Mexico City

  Diana Montaño

  Leer en español Mugshot from Tomás Sánchez’s booking record. One morning in 1908, the fate of Tomás Sánchez, owner of the San Antonio mill on Mexico City’s Pueblita Street, took a sharp… Read More

• Winter 2022

  Wired and CERN

  Steve Miller

  

  Quantum System, 2020, 39 x 69 inches On a trip to Brazil, artist Steve Miller was captivated by the tangled web of power lines in Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro, the largest… Read More

• June 8, 2021

  The Scent of the Freetails

  Deji Bryce Olukotun

  Every parent feared that their kid would become a juicer, but Raj had never considered that his daughter might fall for one. He liked to believe that all the juicers lived far… Read More

• March 23, 2022

  Independent Science for a Daunting Future

  Fred H. Gage, Eric D. Isaacs

  When President Franklin D. Roosevelt called on Vannevar Bush to conceive a new future for American scientific research in the waning days of World War II, Bush responded with a breathtakingly bold… Read More

• March 11, 2022

  What If Our Phones Had Skin?

  Biodesign Challenge

  VISION: Sheathe cell phones in a living, electricity-generating skin made by bacteria, changing how we relate to them and how they are charged. Team: Nada Elkharashi, Sequoia Fischer, Catherine Euale, Paige Perillat-Piratoine… Read More

• Summer 2022

  The Pomological Watercolor Collection

  US Department of Agriculture

  

  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, healthy orchards and groves were seen as crucial to national prosperity. As people across the country created new cultivars, or varieties, through hybridization, the… Read More

• Winter 2022

  Supporting a New Innovation Ecosystem

  It was refreshing and validating to read Melissa Flagg and Arti Garg’s article, “Science Policy From the Ground Up” (Issues, Fall 2021). It’s time to modernize the federal role in the… Read More

• January 27, 2022

  The Hard Math of Minerals

  Mark P. Mills

  The great twentieth-century physicist Richard Feynman once said that “it is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge what energy is.” But we do know one unequivocal fact:… Read More

• Fall 2021

  Codeswitch

  Sanford Biggers

  

  A Visionary Agenda—in Quilts, Mars, and Pound Cake Sanford Biggers, The Talk, 2016. Antique quilt, fabric, tar, and glitter, 80 x 84 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Artists and poets have… Read More

• December 17, 2021

  Can Crop Waste Reduce Plastic Pollution?

  Biodesign Challenge

  VISION: Use agricultural byproducts like molasses from sugar beets and spent grains from beer to make plastic consumer packaging more sustainable and circular.  Team: Joseph Cardenas, Sarah Craven School:… Read More

• December 16, 2021

  Connecting Science Fiction to Science Policy

  Avital Percher

  The people at the bar had already shared their favorite alien species, so I retrieved the next question from the stack of prompts: How comfortable were they with technological body modifications? We… Read More

• February 11, 2021

  US No Longer in Innovation’s Top 10

  Tom Burroughs

  The United States dropped out of the Bloomberg Innovation Index’s top 10 countries this year. The index assesses such things as R&D spending, manufacturing capability, and concentration of high-tech companies. South Korea… Read More

• Winter 2021

  Human-Centered AI

  Ben Shneiderman

  In early 1997, before Alexa and Siri were conceived, I engaged in several public debates with MIT Media Lab professor Pattie Maes about the future of computing and artificial intelligence. The starting… Read More

• November 22, 2021

  Episode 1: Science Policymakers’ Required Reading

  Every Monday afternoon, the Washington, DC, science policy community clicks open an email newsletter from the American Institute of Physics’ science policy news service, FYI, to learn what they’ve missed. We spoke… Read More

• Summer 2018

  The Limits of Dual Use

  Tara Mahfoud, Christine Aicardi, Saheli Datta, Nikolas Rose

  Research and technologies designed to generate benefits for civilians that can also be used for military purposes are termed “dual use.” The concept of dual use frames and informs debates about how… Read More

• Summer 2020

  Public Value Science

  Barry Bozeman

  STEF at 75 Why should the United States government support science? That question was apparently settled 75 years ago by Vannevar Bush in Science, the Endless Frontier: “Since health, well-being, and… Read More

• Spring 2021

  Electric Energy

  Iván Navarro

  

  Iván Navarro, Street Lamp (Yellow Bench), 2012; neon light, cement, metal and electric energy; 38 1/2 × 72 × 43 inches. All images © Courtesy Gallerie Templon, Paris – Brussels. The… Read More

• October 22, 2021

  America on Edge: Settling for Second Place?

  Norman R. Augustine, Neal Lane

  The United States is on edge in ways the nation has rarely experienced throughout its young history. The country’s global leadership is being challenged in a rapidly changing and increasingly competitive world.… Read More

• Spring 2021

  Reimagining Nuclear Engineering

  Aditi Verma, Denia Djokić

  Since the first power reactors—Shippingport in the United States, Calder Hall in the United Kingdom, and Obninsk in the Soviet Union—were connected to electricity grids in the 1950s, nuclear energy has, in… Read More

• October 1, 2021

  For a Competitive Economy, We Need a Skilled Workforce

  Rebecca Blank

  As we imagine a science policy that can rise to the challenges of the next 75 years, worker training and education must be at the center of our efforts. America’s workforce is… Read More

• April 19, 2021

  Humanizing Automation

  Ben Shneiderman

  In a 1942 short story, Isaac Asimov, the legendary science and science fiction author, offered three cleverly constructed, interdependent laws of robotics: A robot may not injure a human being or, through… Read More

• November 19, 2020

  Improving Contact Tracing Tools

  Tom Burroughs

  Millions of Americans can use their smartphones to learn when they have been near someone infected with the novel coronavirus, alerting them to get tested and quarantine themselves. But not many people… Read More

• September 9, 2021

  What a National Technology Strategy Is—and Why the United States Needs One

  Erica R. H. Fuchs

  Over the last half century, the global geopolitical balance of scientific, economic, and production capabilities has shifted away from US dominance. The United States is no longer in a singular position of… Read More

• April 5, 2021

  What Do China’s Scientific Ambitions Mean for Science—and the World?

  Sylvia Schwaag Serger, Cong Cao, Caroline S. Wagner, Xabier Goenaga, Koen Jonkers

  In the past two decades China has become a leading international scientific contributor—not only in resources and publications, but also through its ambition to achieve technological leadership in key industrial sectors. In… Read More

• Summer 2021

  More and More and More Culture

  David Beer

  Back in December, Spotify provided me with an automated and personalized end-of-year review. Drawing upon digital trace data, it delivered a mininarrative of my listening practices. Of the things that stood out,… Read More

• Summer 2021

  Think About Water

  

  An Ecological Artist Collective Think About Water is a collective of ecological artists and activists who got together to use art to elevate the awareness and discussion of water issues. Created by… Read More

• Summer 2021

  How Climate Scenarios Lost Touch With Reality

  Roger Pielke Jr., Justin Ritchie

  The integrity of science depends on its capacity to provide an ever more reliable picture of how the world works. Over the past decade or so, serious threats to this integrity have… Read More

• Summer 2021

  “We Really Should Be Talking About an Ethics of Policymaking, Not Just the Bare-Knuckle Politics of Policymaking.”

  R. Alta Charo, William Kearney

  Illustration by Shonagh Rae From stem cells and cloning, to CRISPR and chimeras, lawyer and bioethicist R. Alta Charo has been a key player in informing policymakers and the public on the… Read More

• February 12, 2021

  The Post Pandemic World

  We asked 17 experts to write about life after COVIDPublic HealthNancy TomesWhat H. G. Wells and the late nineteenth century’s public health revolution can teach us about the potential for great disruptions,… Read More

• April 10, 2020

  A Global Strategy for Preventing the Next Pandemic

  Leah R. Gerber

  As pretty much everyone knows by now, COVID-19 probably jumped from an animal host to humans in an animal and seafood market in Wuhan, China. But that’s just the immediate cause. Although… Read More