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Cities needlessly shine billions of dollars directly into the sky each year and, as a result, a fifth of the world's population cannot see the Milky Way. Malcolm Smith explains why a dark sky has much to offer everyone.
Not all problems will yield to technology. Deciding which will and which won't should be central to setting innovation policy, say Daniel Sarewitz and Richard Nelson.
Although the credit crunch has lowered the price of food, a global recession now raises the hunger pains of the most vulnerable. The stage is set for the next international food crisis, says Joachim von Braun.
Society must respond to the growing demand for cognitive enhancement. That response must start by rejecting the idea that 'enhancement' is a dirty word, argue Henry Greely and colleagues.
The time is right to push global learning beyond primary-school level, says Joel E. Cohen. The benefits could include a dramatically smaller increase in world population by 2050.
'Hot' decision-making, involving the evaluation of reward and punishment, is essential to the entrepreneurial process and may be possible to teach, argue Barbara Sahakian and her coauthors.
As the prospect of personal genomes for all promises to revolutionize personal health records, Patrick Taylor says that mandating consent does not protect privacy or ensure public benefit.
Personal-genome tests are blurring the boundary between experts and lay people. Barbara Prainsack, Jenny Reardon and a team of international collaborators urge regulators to rethink outdated models of regulation.
Science policies based on techno-nationalist thinking and fantasies about the past technological revolutions will get us nowhere fast, says David Edgerton.
With the right plan, systems biology can empower drug discovery, say Adriano Henney and Giulio Superti-Furga. Field leaders have contributed and now the authors want to hear from you.
The field is healthy, says Bill Wakeham, but scientists need to reclaim the intellectual ownership of research at the margins of the discipline such as medical or atmospheric physics.
Researchers need to get past the standard model of vaccine development and focus on how immune responses are specifically tailored to retroviruses, argue Ruslan Medzhitov and Dan Littman.
The OECD is developing a strategy for nations to measure and ultimately promote innovation. It requires knowledge of a complex system, say Fred Gault and Susanne Huttner.
Policies that predict and direct innovative research might seem to be a practical impossibility, says David H. Guston, but social sciences point to a solution.
