Shanthi Chandrasekar, Kolam – Aishwarya (Earth), 2018, acrylic on canvas, 40 x 30 inches.

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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?
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

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?
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.
December 20, 2022

Episode 23: Shirley Malcom – Where Science and Society Meet

Shirley M. Malcom

Shirley M. Malcom is a trailblazer in the area of broadening participation in science. Currently senior advisor and director of the SEA Change initiative at the American Association for the Advancement of… 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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Summer 2023

How to Investigate an Algorithm

Meredith Broussard

At the end of 2021, Sujin Kim was a senior at the University of Michigan. Eager to follow up her undergraduate political science studies with a PhD, Kim was applying to 15… 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.
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
April 12, 2022

Episode 12: Chasing Connections in Climate Action

There is scientific consensus on climate change and its human cause, but how to understand and address global warming remains a divided topic in American life. Art and religion are two lenses… 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

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 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