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• 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.

• Summer 2025

  For Better Soil, Get Better Data

  Vivian Zhong, Clay Mitchell

  If you were buying a house, would you expect the value of the property to be based on its current condition, or its condition 50 years ago? When it comes to farmland… Read More

• Winter 2026

  A Capacity for World-Building

  Tavares Strachan

  

  Across sculpture, painting, text, and music, Tavares Strachan creates immersive environments that blend everyday spaces with surreal landscapes.

• December 12, 2025

  A Lion Roars in Longyearbyen

  Following the mass extinction of most species, the animals that fill a zoo in a future Arctic metropolis are lab-made—with one exception: an aging lion. When the lion escapes in the middle of the city’s Christmas festivities, a complex hunt ensues.

• July 18, 2025

  Reconsidering “Mirror Life”

  Jason Lloyd

  Just as humans have left and right hands that are mirror images of one another, the molecules in our cells have similar properties. Proteins, for instance, are composed of “left-handed” amino acids.… Read More

• Summer 2025

  Innovation’s Hidden Scaffolds

  Lisa Margonelli

  Call it the Vannevar Index: The greater the pressure on the scientific enterprise, the more one hears about Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s science advisor. The New York Times has mentioned Vannevar Bush… Read More

• Summer 2024

  Educating Engineers for a New Nuclear Age

  Aditi Verma, Katie Snyder, Shanna Daly

  Engineering education has long prioritized technical mastery above all else. And though such prioritization has equipped engineers with powerful analytical tools, this singular focus has left them unprepared to address some of… Read More

• Fall 2025

  Tracing the Roots of Motion Capture

  

  Frank and Lillian Gilbreth’s pioneering motion studies laid the groundwork for the sophisticated systems used in biomechanics, animation, and virtual environments today.

• Winter 2025

  AI and Copyright Law

  In “Who Is Responsible for AI Copyright Infringement?” (Issues, Fall 2024), Michael P. Goodyear presents a novel argument for treating AI systems as legal persons capable of direct liability for… Read More

• June 17, 2025

  Neil Chilson Helps Turn Knowledge Into Benefits for Humanity

  Neil Chilson, Jason Lloyd

  Neil Chilson, head of AI policy at the Abundance Institute, discusses what it’s like to work at a policy think tank, the questions about artificial intelligence that motivate his work, and why he is optimistic about our technological future.

• October 31, 2025

  Coser y Cantar

  What does ethical fashion look like? Gabriela Damián Miravete’s story explores transborder labor and the future of the textile industry.

• Summer 2024

  What Can Artificial Intelligence Learn From Nature?

  Refik Anadol Studio

  

  Living Archive: Nature showcases the output from the Large Nature Model (LNM) by Refik Anadol Studio. Refik Anadol Studio in Los Angeles maintains a research practice centered around discovering and developing novel… Read More

• December 3, 2024

  A Cutting-Edge Bureaucracy

  Natalie B. Aviles, Jason Lloyd

  The word “bureaucracy” conjures up images of red tape and long lines at the DMV, not cutting-edge innovation. But some of the most significant scientific and health innovations of the past century… Read More

• Spring 2025

  If These Walls Could Talk

  Kathryn Freeman, Matt Moment

  

  In her enchanting narrative paintings, Kathryn Freeman imagines a world where people coexist with flora and fauna in moments of leisure and creativity.

• August 29, 2025

  The Middle

  When a luxury restaurant’s owner brings in a robot sous-chef, the human staff protest—all but the head chef, who is left alone to navigate how to cook and serve in a human-robot team. The story explores the future of luxury dining, the role of humans in an automated workplace, and what we really crave from a culinary experience.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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

• 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 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

• 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