Science Progress | Where science, technology, and progressive policy meet

Aneesh Chopra Announced as Nation’s First CTO

News leaked Friday that Aneesh Chopra, Secretary of Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia, has been appointed the first federal CTO. President Obama made the official announcement Saturday. While working in Virginia, Chopra lead a highly successful effort to ramp up broadband [...]

BIOETHICS

Ethics Triumph

The new rules on embryonic stem cell research weigh ethical considerations and sound science. Now that’s progressive.

EPA to Regulate Greenhouse Gases

Congressional action on climate change may be the preferred method for mitigating the impact of global warming and moving the United States to a clean energy economy, but the Environmental Protection Agency just turned up the pressure to act. Administrator [...]

Sunlight Labs Pre-Thinks Data.gov

Sunlight Labs, the web development shop of the Sunlight Foundation, runs an occasional series on “Redesigning the Government,” in which they offer redesign and information architecture advice for federal agencies. Today, they’ve conceived a website that doesn’t yet exist, but [...]

Medical Ethics and the CIA’s Secret Detention Program

Reports this week indicate that the Obama administration is leaning towards keeping secret some information on the controversial interrogation tactics used in the CIA’s detention program. But the administration can’t keep secret recently divulged evidence suggesting that fourteen detainees were [...]

SCIENCE, CULTURED

Turning the Knobs of 2009 Climate Policy

Three key “knobs” that our leaders can use to fine tune their climate policies—the role of EPA, the payment of dividends, and the auctioning of permits—will make it easier to achieve legislative or policy victory. And if they get the bass, volume, and tone just right, they can still win.

Women (and Diversity) In Science

In a Washington Post editorial today, Christina Hoff Sommers argues that President Obama’s suggestion that Title IX—which requires equal funding for men’s and women’s school athletics programs—could be used to advance parity for women in science and engineering fields should [...]

INNOVATION

Robots to the Rescue

How can you design the products of tomorrow and create the innovations that will keep the country advancing if you don’t learn how to make anything? Robots can help.

INNOVATION

Making Robots Personal

Science Progress talks with Tandy Trower, general manager of Microsoft’s robotics group, about the future of robotics in the United States and around the globe.

Thomas Edison and the Smartgrid

Our CAP colleague Tom Kenworthy has a column up today on the SmartGridCity project Xcel Energy has set up in Boulder, Colorado. The system integrates broadband communications with power lines to allow customers to monitor power consumption, make efficient choices, [...]

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

How Genes Are Like Plutonium

Patenting unmodified genes rewards discovery, not invention. We must prohibit the process and invalidate all claims to unmodified genes to facilitate more open science.

New Transparency for Genomic Data

The National Human Genome Research Institute recently posted a searchable database and spreadsheet of genome-wide association studies, or GWAS. The catalog includes data on 1309 single nucleotide polymorphisms, called SNPs, from articles in 296 publications. The table explains what traits [...]

Tech Policy Summit

Science Progress is a media sponsor for the upcoming Tech Policy Summit, May 11-13 in Silicon Valley. Speakers will include a broad swath of experts from the science, technology, and transparency communities. Check out the the participants here registration is [...]

Roundup of Holdren Interviews

John Holdren, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, was nominated in the middle of December, but only confirmed by the senate three weeks ago. In the past, he has spoken in earnest about the importance of scientists [...]

Data Bank: Career Paths for Science Grads

As Chris Mooney points out in today’s column, many science graduates are choosing career paths that lie outside academia. This is in part because the career paths within academic science are narrowing, but it is also because the importance of [...]

ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY

Public Lands Are On the Map

Signing the Omnibus Public Land Management Act is only the first step in addressing the diverse and vexing challenges facing our 700 million-acre public land estate—the approximately one-third of our nation’s landscape owned in common by all Americans.

NIH Open Access Policy Turns 1 Year Old

Our guest blogger is Gavin Baker, assistant editor of Open Access News, which covers the open access movement, and Outreach Fellow for SPARC, a coalition of academic and research libraries that advocates for open access. The opinions expressed here are [...]

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