Issues in Science and Technology

Motion Capture

The Measured Body

Mona Sloane, Abigail Z. Jacobs, Emanuel Moss

Redesigning motion capture systems to be more representative of real human bodies and movements could make them fairer and more useful for applications including law enforcement and medical diagnostics.

The Ongoing Transformation

Making AI Chatbots Safer

Megan Nicholson, J. B. Branch

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.

Poetry

Heat Map

Richard Siken

“The neurologist takes out a folder, a picture. He points at my brain with a finger, says here. It looks like a map of a city on fire, a snapshot of weather.”

Real Numbers

Stony the Road We Trod: The Tradeoffs Universities Face in Chasing the R1 Designation

Erin Lynch

As America’s science enterprise is challenged to be more competitive with fewer resources, recognizing and supporting the research capacity of non-R1s offers a path toward a more dynamic innovation landscape.

"Queer Anatomies: Aesthetics and Desire in the Anatomical Image, 1700–1900" by Michael Sappol

Book Review

Beauty in Every Body

Theodore C. Smith

Anatomy has long been recognized as a field at the crossroads of politics, medicine, crime, taboo, professionalism, modesty, racism, sexism, and much else. A new book goes beyond these issues in exploring anatomy’s past, asking if early anatomical illustration could have been a space for the exploration of homoerotic desire, hidden in plain sight.

Responding to War

Not Now, But Soon: The Art of Portraying War

Brigitte van der Sande, Malka Older

Brigitte van der Sande has spent 25 years studying how war is represented in art—research that brought her to many active conflict zones. She discusses how art humanizes the victims of war and spurs action, and how humor and imagination can be forces for resistance.

Digital Data

How “Archive” Became a Verb

Amelia Acker

Debates over a proposed national data center in the 1960s reveal how anxieties around privacy and digitization led to the shift toward corporate control of personal data.

confidence-science-uncertainty-reproducibility-plant

Understanding Uncertainty

Build Confidence in Science by Embracing Uncertainty Rather Than Chasing Reproducibility

Anne L. Plant

Despite calls to fund reproducibility studies, resources would be better spent on developing tools that enable efficient collection and sharing of experimental protocol details and metadata to enable study comparisons.

Science Education

Of Pandas and Science Curricula

Monya Baker

Twenty years ago, a landmark court case held that intelligent design cannot be taught in science classrooms. What lessons does it offer for conflicts in education?

Biosafety

Better Biosecurity for the Bioeconomy

David Gillum

To effectively prevent future biological threats, biosafety must be flexible, with engaged oversight over the entire research life cycle, and biosafety needs leadership and coordination from the top of the federal government.

What Is Fiction’s Role in Imagining Better Social Policies?

December 4, 202512:00pm–1:00pm

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Superglue for Fragmented Policy

Vol. XLII, No. 1, Fall 2025

A remarkable treatment for subdural hematomas involves, essentially, using superglue to repair the brain. The superglue procedure inspires the question of whether there exist analogous policy tools that could help fix systems that suffer from a lack of coordination: the health care bureaucracy, state and federal cannabis regulation, biosecurity, or artificial intelligence.

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From This Issue

Stony the Road We Trod: The Tradeoffs Universities Face in Chasing the R1 Designation

Erin Lynch

Forum

In response to essays published in Issues, our readers weigh in on critical topics in policy related to science, technology, and society.

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Fall 2025
A Path Into the Bioeconomy
A Discussion of
Creating a Popular Foundation for the Bio-Age
Responses By
Maria Chavez Andrew Scarpelli Lisa M. Rasmussen
Fall 2025
Why Should Taxpayers Care About Scientific Cooperation?
A Discussion of
What Happens When the Nuts and Bolts of Science Diplomacy Come Loose?
Responses By
Felicia Fullilove Andrew Gerard Esha Mathew

Beyond the Headlines

To Guide AI’s Impact, Seek Input From Workers

Artificial intelligence already can replace 11.7% of the US labor market, according to a new study reported by CNBC. To help the nation cope with AI’s impact on the workforce, Amanda Ballantyne,… Read More

The Tradeoffs Universities Face in Chasing the R1 Designation

The Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education was meant to be a description of universities’ characteristics that could help researchers and policymakers evaluate the higher ed landscape as a whole. In… Read More

EPA Proposes Looser Wetland Protection

Following years of partisan argument, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced plans to modify the “Waters of the United States” rule, which underpins protection under the Clean Water Act of many of… Read More

Call for Big Tech to Tap HBCU Talent

A federal legislator representing Silicon Valley recently called on big tech firms nationwide to increase their workforce diversity by “looking for talent in every zip code,” including at historically Black colleges and… Read More

Future Tense Fiction

Future Tense Fiction is a speculative fiction series that uses imagination to explore how science and technology will shape our future. It features short stories written by acclaimed authors across a wide range of styles. Each story is paired with original artwork by Rey Velasquez Sagcal and a response essay from an expert who connects the fictional narrative to real-world policy debates.

Can We Cool Down Data?

Claire L. Evans

The energy demands of data centers—accelerated by artificial intelligence—are steering us toward disaster. Could biology help bring us back from the brink?

Response
Subsidence

E. G. Condé

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.
Can Your Health Be Boiled Down to a Single Number?

Lorens Helmchen

If a medical treatment for a life-threatening disease had a 60% chance of success, but another treatment with a 50% success rate had a lower risk of bankrupting your family, which would you choose? What if the success rates were 95 and 90%? Would you change your answer?

Response
Yellow

B. Pladek

If there were an app that estimated the risk of every decision, would you use it? B. Pladek’s short story “Yellow” explores how data changes the way we think about risk—and what happens when that data is manipulated.
Workers’ Hands Tell a Story. What If We Listened?

Alice Driver

In industries like meatpacking and textiles, human hands do strong, precise, and irreplaceable work. What happens when we pretend technology can replicate them?

Response
Coser y Cantar

Gabriela Damián Miravete

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

Collection

Perspectives on Science’s “Social Contract”

Expore the Collection

Over four decades, Issues has hosted many articles discussing science’s “social contract”—the idea, as physicist Harvey Brooks articulated it in 1988, that the scientific enterprise would provide “social benefits in exchange for an unusual degree of self-governance and financial support free of strings.” Today, this contract is clearly defunct: The federal government has cut funding for science, cast doubt on scientific findings, and prioritized investment in research outside the university system. Whatever the future of federally funded science is, it’s no longer “free of strings.” As the scientific enterprise tries to decide how to respond, it first needs to figure out what happened. The collection of these articles is part of an exploration of science’s social contract that is generously supported by The Kavli Foundation.

Discussing Science’s “Social Contract”

Ian Banks, Heather E. Douglas, David H. Guston, C. Brandon Ogbunu, Bina Venkataraman

If the public funds science and gives it autonomy to govern itself, then benefits such as economic growth, innovation, and national security will follow. This unwritten social contract was long thought to underpin policymakers’ relationship to the scientific enterprise, but recent events suggest those days are over.
No Longer Free of Strings

Lisa Margonelli

Why has the idea of an implicit social contract between society and science had a hold on scientists’ imaginations for so long? And what does it mean now that the relationship has frayed?
It’s Time for Universities to Redesign Their 75-Year-Old Contract

Michael M. Crow, William B. Dabars, David V. Rosowsky

American research universities have unleashed an age of massive technical innovation—but they’ve failed to innovate their own designs to meet the changing needs of society.
“The More Inclusion We Have in Science, the Better Outcomes We’ll Get.”

Eddie Bernice Johnson, Molly Galvin

Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson spent five decades in public service, during which she ushered through landmark science and technology legislation and helped to advance opportunities for all Americans.