Essay in 2007

As the average number of contributors to individual papers continues to rise, science's credit system is under pressure to evolve.

To understand how our planet uses energy, we must integrate genetic data from microbial studies with satellite views of our planet.

Occasionally science makes procedures possible that are so radical that those at the interface between science and politics are called on to define moral standards for society.

Providing cures for health problems isn't enough, if people's personal or cultural beliefs clash with the scientific approach. Policy-makers must recognize and engage with these objections.

To save lives and livelihoods, natural and social scientists must work with decision-makers and politicians in the time between natural disasters as well as during them.

Drosophila transformed developmental genetics and cell biology. Now the fruitfly is poised to help biologists decipher how the brain works.

The public should be consulted on contentious research and development early enough for their opinions to influence the course of science and policy-making.

Researchers and policy-makers need ways for accommodating the partiality of scientific knowledge and for acting under the inevitable uncertainty it holds.

Science advisers should have confidence in their data, or risk being undermined by more dogmatic and vociferous stakeholders during the policy-making process.

This week's report on obesity policy in the United Kingdom highlights three challenges for scientists and politicians working together.

Enthusing and informing government members about science can have surprising and gratifying results.

Atomic energy was cutting edge when the Windscale fire showed the world the effects of a nuclear accident. Fifty years on, we have more innovative ways to generate electricity.

When the Sputnik satellite went into orbit in 1957, it revolutionized the practice of international science and changed the demography of Western research.

In 1957, science advisers were brought into the White House as the President's Science Advisory Committee. Its demise has deprived the US government of invaluable counsel.

Where relativity and quantum mechanics clash, new laws of physics should emerge.

Doctors at the Dutch Trading House on Dejima were a conduit for science into and out of Europe.

Whether ancient or new, in distant galaxies or our own cosmic back-yard, stars have dramatic similarities that hint at remarkably robust formative processes.

The notion that eukaryotes evolved via a merger of cells from the other two domains — archaea and bacteria — overlooks known processes.

Even though our view of the physical world has shifted from that of determinism to randomness, randomness itself can now be exploited to retrieve a system's deterministic response.

As the complex interplay of forces in the ocean responds to climate change, the dynamics of global ocean circulation are shifting.