WorksWomb for improvement
Pregnancy can be arduous, painful and for some women impossible. New technology may allow more women to have children, and save the lives of more prematurely born infants. How do we get there?
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Fire has almost disappeared as a cause of death in the developed world. A similar approach could do the same for infectious diseases.
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Snakebites kill between 80,000 and 140,000 people every year. Better antivenom should be a high priority – thankfully new technology can help.
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Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence are forcing skeptics to eat their words. We should take its risks seriously too.
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Scientific papers are dense, jargon-filled, and painful to read. It wasn’t always this way – and it doesn’t have to be.
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Nanotechnology sometimes sounds as much like science fiction as artificial intelligence once did. But the problems holding it back seem solvable, and some of the answers may lie inside our own bodies.
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Outdated forms of peer review create bottlenecks that slow down science. But in a world where research can now circulate rapidly on the Internet, we need to develop new ways to do science in public.
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Bacteriophages – viruses that infect bacterial cells – were almost forgotten in the age of antibiotics. Now as bacterial resistance grows, they may return to help us in our hour of need.
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Innovation prizes seem to solve many problems in science and technology. But their famous role in helping sailors calculate longitude is misunderstood, and they may work best when used to promote refinements, not revolutions.
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Gas heating is bad for the environment. But home-built heat pumps aren’t perfect either. The best option might be geothermal energy grids that take the best from both ways of heating people’s homes.
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Some think of advances in science and technology through the metaphor of low-hanging fruit: we “picked” the easy ones, and the rest will be very difficult. But it may not be the ideas that are getting harder to find – it’s us that are getting worse at finding them.
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It’s surprisingly hard to explain why plagiarism is actually wrong, if it is at all. But our anti-plagiarism instincts reflect practical considerations for advancing science, and we discard them at our peril.
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Our success is based on scientific discovery, so it’s not surprising how much faith we put into it. But we now trust science so implicitly that our trust undermines the institution itself.
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We have eradicated smallpox, cured many bacterial diseases, and invented a vaccine for Covid-19 within the year. But for a very long time we haven’t had a single good treatment for obesity. Has that now changed?
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Could an asteroid wipe out human civilisation like it may have eliminated the dinosaurs? Big asteroids come along extremely rarely and our monitoring systems are effective and well funded. We should be safe.
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Covid-19 brought death, suffering and financial straits, so it was unsurprising that depression rose around the world. But when the data came in, we found suicide did not – and it’s a mystery why.
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The story behind humanity’s greatest environmental success is too rarely told and too often taken for granted. This is how humanity fixed the ozone layer and why it matters.
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Researchers have known for decades that lead poisoning damages brains and worsens crime, but millions of Americans still drink contaminated water every day. Here’s how we can fix that.
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Are technology and the environment friends or foes? In this wide-ranging conversation, Nick Whitaker and Saloni Dattani discuss climate policy, activism and ecomodernism with Ted Nordhaus, director of the Breakthrough Institute.
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The conversation around science is full of ideas for reform, but how do we know which ones will be effective? To find out what works, we need to apply the scientific method to science itself.
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Critics of scientific reform maintain that transparency comes at the cost of speed. What can disciplines of science learn from each other to break free of this crisis and expand our universe of knowledge?
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Alongside all the successes of science in the Covid era, the pandemic has also sparked an outbreak of viral misinformation and sloppy research, revealing the glaring flaws in our scientific system.
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Bad incentives, muddled theory and no practical use. The condition of the social sciences has been blamed on a great variety of things; what’s really at fault and how do we know?
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Electrical interference has restricted what humans can observe with existing telescopes. In order to continue making leaps as a species, now is the time for us to build a telescope on the far side of the moon.
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Scientific research today is afflicted by poor reliability and low utility, despite the best efforts of individual researchers. If we want to stimulate research that is both accurate and useful, it’s time to put science to the challenge.
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