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
The new rules on embryonic stem cell research weigh ethical considerations and sound science. Now that’s progressive.
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, 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 [...]
Nicholas Wade has an overview in the New York Times of a package of articles released this week in the New England Journal of Medicine about the limits of genomewide association studies. At issue is the fact that such studies [...]
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
Patenting unmodified genes rewards discovery, not invention. We must prohibit the process and invalidate all claims to unmodified genes to facilitate more open science.
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
The short newsbreak available at the moment seems like a small portion of a longer forthcoming feature, but the wire focused on the OSTP director’s comments on geoengineering: John Holdren told The Associated Press in his first interview since being [...]
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 [...]
SCIENCE, CULTURED
Many students don’t see a life of academic specialization as the best way to employ their scientific talents. They want to do something more, to bring science to the rest of America.
ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
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.
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 [...]
Science Progress and American Progress's Doing What Works project teamed up to produce a set of policy proposals that the Obama administration and Congress can adopt to reinvest in the building blocks of American science, innovation, and economic competitiveness. Read the overview of the five reports.
Science Progress proceeds from the propositions that scientific inquiry is among the finest expressions of human excellence, that it is a crucial source of human flourishing, a critical engine of economic growth, and must be dedicated to the common good. Scientific inquiry entails global responsibilities. It should lead to a more equitable, safer, and healthier future for all of humankind.