The Doomsday Clock is an internationally recognized design that conveys how close we are to destroying our civilization with dangerous technologies of our own making. First and foremost among these are nuclear weapons, but the dangers include climate-changing technologies, emerging... Read More
My fellow discussants repeatedly allude to the same reason to explain why we need to keep
sequence data public: Not doing so would harm the advancement of science and would prevent the
Getting into a public talk at the Energy Department has become a surreal exercise, which is worrisome considering all the notoriously mismanaged agency is charged to do.
First, I want to make clear that I strongly support women's right to safe, voluntary, and
accessible birth-control services--as an end in itself, not as a means to drive down population
By supplying Iran with nuclear reactor fuel, Moscow might have taken an important step in preventing countries interested in nuclear power from enriching uranium indigenously.
The commercial nuclear age started on December 2, 1957, when the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania began operating--the first use of a nuclear power plant dedicated solely to peaceful purposes. Five months earlier, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was founded with a dual mandate--promote the peaceful uses of atomic energy and prevent its military uses. Ever since, the tension inherent in this mission has strained and constrained the application and evolution of IAEA safeguards.
The participants of this roundtable, including myself, agree that it is a bad idea to limit access to pathogen sequence information. However, we seem to disagree on why we agree.
Four recent reports outline ways in which Washington can fix the dysfunctional, underfunded civilian agencies that define and implement U.S. foreign policy and assistance activities.
Clearly, population growth is an important aspect of environmental stress, as every man, woman,
and child requires food, water, clothing, shelter, and energy. However, it isn't necessarily the
root cause of climate change.
Ever since Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin in 1928, antibiotics have kept simple cuts, scratches, and abrasions from becoming severely infected and prevented diseases such as pneumonia, scarlet fever, and tuberculosis from becoming a death sentence. However, antibiotics contain a serious downside: Their overuse and misuse has contributed to an increase in antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), vancomycin-resistant enterococcus (VRE), and extreme drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-Tb).
Superficially, it seems remote that a new wave of mass activism against nuclear weapons
comparable to the vast outpouring of popular protest during the early 1980s will develop anytime
It's exhilarating to see the fruits of climate research achieve such prominence in the media,
political debate, and concerns of industrial and municipal stakeholders. As scientists, though,
The other participants in this roundtable have (rightly) focused not on the access to genetic sequence information, but what it is possible to do with that information. In one scenario, sequence information could be used to recreate
On July 16, 2007, an earthquake with a magnitude of somewhere between 6.6 and 6.8 struck Japan. Its epicenter was about 16 kilometers north of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP), the biggest such plant in the world. The known results of the earthquake include a fire and leaks of radioactivity. However, news of damage to the reactors continues to emerge, the most recent being the discovery of a jammed control rod in Unit-7.
Human population continues to grow by more than 75 million people annually. Since the first
Earth Day in 1970, global population and annual carbon dioxide emissions have both increased by
about 70 percent. As a result,
Security experts, members of the arms control community, and bioscientists routinely name
bioterrorism as one of the most challenging threats to national and international security. In my
In Africa, nearly every aspect of human development (health, agricultural, educational, or industrial) depends upon reliable access to modern energy sources. Therefore, it's worth investigating whether nuclear power can safely alleviate energy shortages and optimize an energy mix consistent with the national interests of African countries.
How do we get our arguments out and win? That's the million-dollar question, and a question that
we're right to continually strategize around. But in this regard, I've noticed two mistaken
Over the next 50 years, progress to meaningfully address the risk of significant climate change will require an estimated 80-percent or more reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions. Global emissions now include more than 7 billion tons of carbon being pumped into the atmosphere annually, three-quarters of which come from fossil fuel combustion (with the remainder largely from land conversion and forest burning), and their rate of accumulation is increasing.
"I'm just a model whose intentions are good, Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood,"
Nina Simone may as well have sung. Models are fundamentally necessary in all sciences. They exist
Is the availability of genetic information dangerous? Certainly. But so is driving a car, flying
to the moon, or falling in love. We do a lot of dangerous things, simply because the benefits
outweigh our concerns.
Proliferation watchers have kept track of A. Q. Khan's activities for about 30 years. In 1979, the Washington Post named him as the Pakistani engineer who had left his position at the uranium enrichment centrifuge facility at Almelo, Netherlands, four years earlier with "lists of subcontractors and probably blueprints for the plant." Khan then returned to Pakistan, where he soon became director of the country's secret uranium enrichment project at Kahuta, near Islamabad, and a key player in its nuclear weapons program.
Congress is once again working overtime to complete the federal budget. National security is at the forefront of the debate, as Congress has finally passed (and the president has signed) its $459.3 billion defense appropriations bill for fiscal year 2008. (The bill also contains another $11.6 billion in emergency spending for the new mine-resistant, ambush-protected armored personnel carrier intended for the army and marines in Iraq.)
On February 13, 2007, North Korea and its five negotiating adversaries (the United States, South Korea, China, Japan, and Russia) agreed to reaffirm their 2005 commitments to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula but in a carefully sequenced manner. First Pyongyang was to freeze its plutonium production, then declare and disable its nuclear-weapons related capacities, and finally dismantle or remove those capacities irreversibly.
