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• February 3, 2026

  How Cannabis Regulation Became a Giant Experiment

  Symone T. Griffith, Maxwell C. K. Leung, Kelsey Schoenberg

  The legality of cannabis in many states has been decided by voters, not regulators, and it remains illegal at the federal level. How has this divide shaped cannabis safety, research, and policy?

• Winter 2026

  Flipping the Data Collection Script

  Communities should decide for themselves whether they need, want, or are ready for collecting data such as motion capture.

• Winter 2026

  Making the Invisible Visible

  Emily Packard Dawson

  Drawing on nearly a decade of research, Diane M. Tober situates egg donors at the center of a sprawling, ethically thorny, and economically complex system. The result is one of the most detailed portraits yet of the hidden labor sustaining assisted reproduction.

• Spring 2026

  Merton Redux: Re-Confronting the Norms of Science in Democracy

  Natalie B. Aviles, Janet Vertesi

  Although public attention is focused on the federal government’s efforts to slash funding for scientific research, the decimation of the democratic institutional processes that undergird state-sponsored scientific research is far more consequential.

• 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

  “There Are Two Possible Futures for American Science.”

  David Spergel, Molly Galvin

  Simons Foundation president David Spergel talks about the evolving landscape for science philanthropy, his outlook for the research enterprise, and remaining hopeful in an uncertain time.

• May 29, 2026

  Golden Rule

  In an alternative legal system built on the concept of “an eye for an eye,” if you commit a crime, your punishment is that someday a network of state agents will perpetrate the same crime against you. These ministers, themselves survivors of violence, follow the principle of “commensurate severity.” When one such minister is assigned to a kidnapping case, she’s forced to determine what justice really looks like.

• Spring 2024

  How Space Art Shaped National Identity

  Carolyn Russo

  

  Space exploration became firmly interwoven with American culture through influential speeches by President John F. Kennedy at a time of heightened awareness of the “space race” between the United States and the… Read More

• Fall 2025

  Friction Between the Inside and the Outside: The Visionary Work of Fred Tomaselli

  

  What happens when Eastern and Western decorative traditions meet psychotropic substances, organic matter, and found objects?

• Fall 2025

  A Firebreak for Mirror Life

  Regulation may not be enough to prevent the potential harms of mirror life. Is it time for a “firebreak” that makes the creation of mirror organisms impossible?

• November 25, 2025

  Making AI Chatbots Safer

  J. B. Branch, Megan Nicholson

  AI chatbots generate conversations with users and can appear, at times, quite human. J. B. Branch discusses who is using chatbots, what the companies behind these AIs are doing, and how they might be regulated.

• 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.

• Spring 2025

  Let Unfunded Grant Applications See the Light of Day

  Stuart Buck, Christopher Steven Marcum

  Showing which proposals do and don’t receive federal funding can improve research and advance open science.

• Fall 2025

  A Strategy for Building Space Nuclear Systems That Fly

  Bhavya Lal, Roger M. Myers

  NASA’s new directive to design, build, and deploy a nuclear reactor on the Moon by 2030 will require a commitment to implementation, leadership from the White House, and learning from six decades of failures.

• 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 2024

  Embracing the Social in Social Science

  Rayvon Fouché

  To begin thinking about why all the sciences should embrace the social in social science, I would like to start with cupcakes. In my research, context is a recurring theme, so let… Read More

• January 30, 2026

  Deficiency Agent

  How will artificial intelligence transform warfare? Andrew Liptak’s story brings us to the front lines to see how a glitchy combat AI deals with the tricky task of balancing the demands of a mission with the unpredictability of the battlefield.

• September 2, 2025

  How to Safely Study “Mirror Life”

  Tom Burroughs

  Worried about the potential perils of “mirror life” organisms, whose molecular structures are reverse images of their natural counterparts, scientists have widely stopped studying them—with some researchers calling for an outright ban.… Read More

• Spring 2024

  Boost Opportunities for Science Learning With Regional Alliances

  Susan Singer, Heidi Schweingruber, Kerry Brenner

  By many metrics, Tennessee struggles in science education. The number of candidates finishing teacher preparation programs fell nearly 40% from 2014 to 2020; if that trend continues, the state will produce no… Read More

• 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.

• 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

• February 11, 2025

  How Do You Solve a Problem Like Misinformation?

  Monya Baker, Asheley Landrum

  Vaccines, oil spills, genetic engineering, and stem cells—anywhere there’s science, there’s also misinformation. It muddies our ability to make good decisions, ranging from far-reaching ones like creating policy to simple ones like… 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

• July 1, 2025

  What Does a Cormorant Feel?

  Brandon Keim, Lisa Margonelli

  Brandon Keim discusses animal personhood, movements around animal representation, and cormorants—one named Cosmos in particular.

• November 21, 2025

  Subsidence

  The AI boom means more demands on data centers—and running a data center requires complex technical infrastructure, vast environmental resources, and experienced human talent. In E. G. Condé’s story, a labyrinthine data center is in the middle of a massive outage. When the corporation that owns the center fails to diagnose the problem provoking the outage with its fancy technical systems, it’s forced to turn to human intuition to sniff out a more fundamental dilemma.