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• 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

• Spring 2021

  Science for Hyper-Partisan Times

  Jeffrey Warren

  If the 2016 presidential election began an era of especially unbridled political rancor in the United States, North Carolinians were ahead of the curve by November 2010, when elections awarded Republicans the… Read More

• Spring 2021

  A Manifesto to Responsibly Extend Reality Into Virtual Realms

  Dhoya Snijders, Rinie Van Est

  We perceive physical reality with our senses: we see the blue sky, hear waves crashing on the beach, feel the wind in our hair. As technology such as augmented reality (AR) and… 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

• April 1, 2022

  Could Bacteria and Algae Make a Tree?

  Biodesign Challenge

  VISION: Turn food byproducts into wood alternatives Team: Gabriel Tavas, Angela Andrada, Jared Fligelman, Kanika Leang, Eddie Rajcevic, Hannah Gaffner A single hardwood tree takes decades to grow to the size where… Read More

• Fall 2021

  Ending the Reproducibility Crisis

  Shannon Brownlee, Bibiana Bielekova

  Illustration by Shonagh Rae Biomedical science is capable of great feats, just one of which is the astonishingly rapid development of vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Vaccine production generally takes 10–15 years,… 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 14, 2022

  Episode 10: Creating a “High-Minded Enterprise”: Vannevar Bush and Postwar Science Policy

  Jason Lloyd, G. Pascal Zachary

  G. Pascal Zachary, Vannevar Bush’s biographer and editor of a new collection of his writings, talks about this remarkable polymath, the background behind his landmark report, and his surprising legacy for the information age.

• December 18, 2020

  To Respond to the Pandemic, the Government Needs Better Data on Domestic Companies That Make Critical Medical Supplies

  Erica R. H. Fuchs, Valerie J. Karplus, Nikhil Kalathil, M. Granger Morgan

  Responding to a large-scale health emergency—such as the current COVID-19 pandemic—in a timely and efficient manner requires real-time data about the current state of manufacturing of critical medical supplies. Policymakers require such… 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

• 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

• 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

• February 16, 2022

  Working in the Penumbra of Understanding

  William S. Hammack, John L. Anderson

  At their core, science and engineering have different goals and thus different methods. As Theodore von Kármán, an engineer who received the first National Medal of Science in 1962, put it, “Scientists… 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

• 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 2018

  Artificial Intelligence, Robots, and Work: Is This Time Different?

  Stuart W. Elliott

  Over the past few years, there has been increasing public discussion about the potential impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and robots on work. However, despite the attention given to the issue, there… 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

• 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

• Fall 2019

  An Unsettling History

  Susan M. Fitzpatrick

  In the days and weeks after the horrific dual mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, in early August 2019, the national conversation focused once again—how disturbing that phrase, “once… 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