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• Winter 2025

  How Some Universities Translate Inclusive Innovation Into Regional Growth

  Mercedes Delgado, Fiona Murray

  Positioning universities as hubs of inclusive innovation, particularly in less inventive places, can shift local workforce demographics and accelerate growth.

• Spring 2026

  We Created a Survey to Measure Community Well-Being and Activated a “Messy Middle”

  Natalie Bomstad

  How a Wisconsin county realized that systems change requires shared sensemaking as much as innovative metrics.

• May 5, 2026

  Kumar Garg Funds Ideas That Are “Big, if True”

  Kumar Garg, Monya Baker

  Kumar Garg, president of Renaissance Philanthropy, shares how he has spent his career finding, funding, and implementing ideas both within the government and outside it via philanthropy, which is uniquely positioned to pilot “big, if true” ideas.

• Fall 2025

  Don’t Forget the Farmers

  Will farmers see a benefit from modernized soil tests that provide more accurate assessments of soil quality—and therefore land value?

• Spring 2026

  How the American Research University Survives

  Robert A. Brown, Bruce R. Guile

  University leadership needs to shift attention from chasing prestige to crafting strategies for long-term success.

• Winter 2026

  Repurposing Grand Challenges in Tumultuous Times

  Martin Ho, Pramod P. Khargonekar, Eoin O’Sullivan

  As research budgets tighten, priorities evolve, and new funding models emerge, the grand challenge framework can restore coherence, direction, and shared purpose across the scientific enterprise.

• Winter 2026

  How I Learned to Conduct Research That Makes a Difference in the Lives of Arizona’s Kids

  Gabriel Q. Shaibi

  Gabriel Shaibi was trained to gather evidence about diabetes prevention. To have an impact, he learned to gather partners.

• 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.

• 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

• 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 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 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.

• 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

• July 9, 2024

  A Road Map for a New Era in Biology and Medicine

  Lydia Contreras, Monya Baker

  Most people are familiar with DNA, but its cousin, RNA, has become widely known only recently. In 2020, of course, RNA was in the news all the time: the COVID-19 virus is… Read More

• 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.

• March 7, 2023

  Episode 27: Confronting Extreme Heat With the World’s First Chief Heat Officer

  Jane Gilbert, Jason Lloyd

  Miami is so renowned for its warm weather that its professional basketball team is the Miami Heat. But extreme heat can be life-threatening, even in cities like Miami that are used to… 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

• January 16, 2024

  Generative AI Is a Crisis for Copyright Law

  Kate Crawford, Jason Schultz

  Generative artificial intelligence is driving copyright into a crisis. More than a dozen copyright cases about AI were filed in the United States last year, up severalfold from all filings from 2020… 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

• 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

• 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

• Winter 2023

  What the Ukraine-Russia War Means for South Korea’s Defense R&D

  Keonyeong Jeong, Yongseok Seo, Kyungmoo Heo

  South Koreans are watching the war between Russia and Ukraine not as a far-off conflict, but as a possible model for future power struggles in East Asia—especially in the context of increasing… Read More

• Fall 2022

  A Vision for Democratizing Government Data

  Julia Lane

  During the earliest weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a desperate need for data to respond to the worst labor market crisis in almost a century. State-administered unemployment claims skyrocketed. Jobseekers,… 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

• 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

• 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

• Summer 2020

  Public Value Science

  Barry Bozeman

  STEF at 75 Why should the United States government support science? That question was apparently settled 75 years ago by Vannevar Bush in Science, the Endless Frontier: “Since health, well-being, and… Read More

• October 22, 2021

  America on Edge: Settling for Second Place?

  Norman R. Augustine, Neal Lane

  The United States is on edge in ways the nation has rarely experienced throughout its young history. The country’s global leadership is being challenged in a rapidly changing and increasingly competitive world.… Read More

• Spring 2021

  Open to Experimentation

  Adam Millsap, Neil Chilson

  America is an especially philanthropic society. It has ranked number one on the World Giving Index for the last 10 years. A 2016 report found that annual charitable giving in the United… Read More

• April 5, 2021

  What Do China’s Scientific Ambitions Mean for Science—and the World?

  Sylvia Schwaag Serger, Cong Cao, Caroline S. Wagner, Xabier Goenaga, Koen Jonkers

  In the past two decades China has become a leading international scientific contributor—not only in resources and publications, but also through its ambition to achieve technological leadership in key industrial sectors. In… Read More