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• 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 21, 2023

  Episode 26: You’ve Been Misinformed About Sharks

  David Shiffman, Lisa Margonelli

  Recent conversations about scientific misinformation have concentrated on what is new: social media and algorithms that spread all kinds of information—reliable and unreliable—surprisingly fast. But misinformation has long been an issue for… 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.

• November 18, 2021

  The Ongoing Transformation

  For the Issues podcast, we talk with fascinating people to get a behind-the-scenes look at how their research and ideas are transforming our world. Listen and subscribe to The Ongoing Transformation wherever … Read More

• Fall 2021

  Reflections on a Tool of Observation

  Timothy Makepeace

  

  Cryogenic Test Structure, 2018, charcoal on paper, 49 x 49 inches In 2017, Washington, DC-based artist Timothy Makepeace was one of several artists selected by NASA to create artwork inspired by… Read More

• 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

• May 16, 2023

  Episode 31: Race, Genetics, and a “Most Dangerous Myth”

  Ann Morning, Monya Baker

  The concept of distinct races came from European naturalists in the 1700s. It’s now recognized as a social construct, rather than a biological classification. Nonetheless, genetics researchers sometimes use race or ethnicity to… Read More

• November 22, 2024

  A Time Between

  Detectives digging into evidence of a tragic death find themselves confronted with two different versions of the past—and, perhaps, the present.

• Winter 2020

  How Academic Science Gave Its Soul to the Publishing Industry

  Mark W. Neff

  STEF at 75 America’s globally preeminent university research enterprise is constructed on two bedrock principles of self-governance. The first is autonomy: academic scientists should be left free to determine their own research… Read More

• December 13, 2024

  A Healing at the Triple B Trophy Lodge

  What if you could create a clone of someone who has done you harm—and then kill it? When a skeptical journalist visits the cultish “kill therapy” retreat to profile its ambitious founder, she inadvertently opens the door to histories she had long endeavored to forget.

• November 8, 2024

  Collateral Damage

  From the Future Tense Fiction archives: A short story from Justina Ireland about what happens when a robot is sent into combat alongside human soldiers.

• October 25, 2024

  Patrons

  Cassidy McFadzean imagines extraterrestrials who selectively lift humans from Earth and transport them to a deep-space artists colony. As they do, the distant visitors, known as Patrons, dramatically shift the terrestrial communities where they touch down.

• Spring 2024

  An Elusive and Indefinable Boundary

  Virginia Hanusik

  

  Seven years before the release of Silent Spring in 1962, marine biologist and writer Rachel Carson wrote The Edge of the Sea. Part field guide to the Atlantic seashore, part meditation on… Read More

• September 27, 2024

  Move Fast and Fake Things

  In a recent episode of the podcast Women at Warp, the hosts discussed their favorite episodes of the various Star Trek series in which the Holodeck—a fully immersive, interactive virtual reality… Read More

• Spring 2021

  Technoscientific Bodies

  Michael Sappol

  

  The sensory pathway and radio system, in Gerhard Venzmer et al., Hand- und Lehrbuch der Krankenpflege 1 (Stuttgart: Franckh’sche Verlag, 1938), pl. 10. Originally from Fritz Kahn, Das Leben des Menschen … Read More

• Winter 2023

  The Complicated Legacy of Terry Wallis and His Brain Injury

  Joseph J. Fins

  illustration by Shonagh Rae In the eight years that I have been teaching a seminar on disability rights and brain injury at Yale Law School, I have never come close to tears. But last… Read More

• Fall 2023

  An Epic Battle Against Polluters

  Charles N. Herrick

  When we think about the evolution of environmental policy, many of us tend to imagine congressional committee wrangling, Sierra Club activists trying to out-hustle coal industry lobbyists, and competing policy briefs from… Read More

• Spring 2023

  Visions of Nursing

  Anne Wallentine

  

  Tim Okamura, Nurse Tamika, 2021, oil on wood panel, 24 x 30 in. During conflict or crisis—from wars and pandemics to individual health emergencies—nurses are often depicted in art as heroes… Read More

• December 6, 2022

  Episode 22: Peaches, Pimentos, and Myths of Innovation

  Cynthia R. Greenlee, Lisa Margonelli

  The challenge of transforming regional economies through technological innovation is at the heart of current discussions about science and industrial policy—not to mention the CHIPs and Science Act itself. To think about what regional… Read More

• January 24, 2024

  To Discourage Science Misconduct, Encourage “Delight of Discovery”

  Tom Burroughs

  A top research center, the Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, plans to retract or correct numerous scientific papers amid allegations that the authors falsified data by manipulating images. In Issues, the science… Read More

• January 16, 2024

  The Question Isn’t Asset or Threat; It’s Oversight

  Emmanuel Didier

  As part of a research group studying generative AI with France’s Académie Nationale de Médecine, I was surprised by some clinicians’ technological determinism—their immediate assumption that this technology would, on its own,… Read More

• Summer 2023

  Why Space Debris Flies Through Regulatory Gaps

  Marilyn Harbert, Asha Balakrishnan

  Within an eight-day period in March 2023, astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) fired their thrusters twice to avoid a projected collision. Part of a dead satellite was hurtling toward the… Read More

• Fall 2023

  Environmental Apparitions

  Brandon Ballengée

  

  Brandon Ballengée, SOS Humpback Black Seadevil Anglerfish, 2023, salvaged latex house paint on thrifted cotton bed sheets, 77 x 96 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles,… Read More

• Spring 2023

  How Science Gets Drawn Into Global Conspiracy Narratives 

  Marc Tuters, Tom Willaert, Trisha Meyer

  A few short years ago, mRNA (messenger ribonucleic acid) was the subject of fundamental research, but it is now known as the basis for COVID-19 vaccines. At the same time, the concept… Read More

• September 11, 2023

  China Accused of Using AI to Spread Disinformation

  Tom Burroughs

  Chinese operatives are using artificial intelligence to create fake images to be spread on US social media, the tech giant Microsoft alleges, with the goal of sowing disinformation among the voting public… Read More

• Summer 2021

  COVID Artifacts

  James Gouldthorpe

  

  It’s been more than a year since the pandemic started. Now that vaccines have arrived, a measure of hope has returned. But memories of the early days of the pandemic lie close… Read More

• Fall 2022

  Imagining a Better Internet

  The future of technology is too often imagined and engineered by corporations and venture capitalists, foreclosing more radical possibilities. Today, it is Meta’s iteration of the Metaverse that dominates headlines, a riff… Read More