Food is an essential part of our lives, but for many people fresh food is something they find in a grocery store, not growing in their communities. How can art and advances in agricultural science create new food resources, connect communities, and create more resilient food systems?

On this episode, host J. D. Talasek is joined by artists David Allen Burns and Austin Young of Fallen Fruit and professor Molly Jahn from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to explore how creativity and systems thinking can change the food system.

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This summer, Congress is trying to reconcile the differences between two massive bills focused on strengthening US competitiveness and spurring innovation: the House-passed COMPETES Act and the Senate-passed USICA bill. In this episode, we speak with Mitch Ambrose from FYI, the American Institute of Physics’ science policy news service, about the historic conference aimed at negotiating the House and Senate bills. What are the competing visions for US competitiveness in the bills? How do the details get worked out, and what happens if Congress fails to reach an agreement?

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Follow FYI’s coverage and subscribe to their newsletters at aip.org/fyi.

Who gets to be a scientist? At BioJam, a free Northern California summer camp, the answer is everyone. This week we talk with Callie Chappell, Rolando Perez, and Corinne Okada Takara about how BioJam engages high school students and their communities to create art through bioengineering. Started as an intergenerational collective in 2019, BioJam was designed to change the model of science communication and education into a multi-way collaboration between the communities of Salinas, East San Jose, and Oakland, and artists and scientists at Stanford. At BioJam, youth are becoming leaders in the emerging fields of biodesign and biomaking—and in the process, redefining what it means to be a scientist.

Resources:

Read their essay, "Bioengineering Everywhere, For Everyone," and see the youth artwork.

Visit the BioJam website to learn more.

When it comes to exploring the mind-boggling complexity of living systems—ranging from the origins of human consciousness to treatments for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s—Susan Fitzpatrick has long been a critic of reductionist thinking. In this episode we talk with Fitzpatrick, who has spent three decades supporting brain research as president of the James S. McDonnell Foundation, about new ways to understand the human brain, the difficulty of developing an effective Alzheimer’s treatment, and how scientific research can successfully confront complex problems.

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How do budgets evolve into policies? As Congress starts to appropriate money for President Biden’s 2023 budget requests, we talk with Matt Hourihan, director of the R&D Budget and Policy Program for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Hourihan tells of his own introduction to the byzantine mysteries of the budget, how the process works (and sometimes doesn’t work!), and what the numbers reveal about today’s science policy priorities.

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Follow Matt on Twitter at @MattHourihan.

There is scientific consensus on climate change and its human cause, but how to understand and address global warming remains a divided topic in American life. Art and religion are two lenses through which new perspectives on climate change might be discovered. In this episode, we talk to photographer James Balog and climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe about how their work creates connections across different ways of knowing, such as art, science, or religion. How can these connections—along with a better understanding of influences such as personal geographies and socioeconomic backgrounds—inform meaningful ways to confront climate change?

Resources:

·  Visit Katharine Hayhoe’s website for more of her work and links to her social media.

·  Visit James Balog’s website and the Earth Vision institute to learn more about James.

·  Extreme Ice Survey: James’s innovative, long-term photography project to give a visual voice to the planet’s changing ecosystems.

·  Read James’s new book, The Human Element: A Time Capsule from the Anthropocene

·  Watch James’s movies, The Human Element and Chasing Ice.

·  Read Katharine’s new book, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World

·  Watch Katharine’s Global Weirding: Climate, Politics, and Religion videos on Youtube

Between 2009 and 2019, India brought electricity to half a billion citizens, and then turned around and presided over a grid where power from wind and solar became cheaper than electricity from coal in 2018. India’s carbon-heavy government ministries have shown a surprising ability to engineer deep change. Kartikeya Singh, senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, talks with us about what role these ministries–which employ 20 million people—could play in creating an energy sector that is ecologically and economically sustainable.

Read Kartikeya Singh’s essay, Bureaucracies for the Better.

Visit issues.org for more episodes, conversations and articles. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn! Comments? Questions? Tweet us or email us at [email protected].

Vannevar Bush is a towering figure in US science and technology policy. A science adviser to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman during and after World War II, he mobilized the US research community in support of the war effort and was a major figure in the creation of the National Science Foundation.

Although his influence on the history and institutions of US science and technology is unparalleled, the full breadth of Bush’s thinking remains underappreciated today. We talk with writer and educator G. Pascal Zachary, Bush’s biographer and editor of a new collection of his writings, about this remarkable polymath, the background behind his landmark report, Science, the Endless Frontier, and his surprising legacy for the information age.

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The United States is justifiably proud of the accomplishments of its taxpayer-funded biomedical innovation system. But these innovations don’t benefit all Americans equally, which means, among other things, that the richest live 10 to 15 years longer than the very poor. In this episode we speak with Shobita Parthasarathy, a professor at the University of Michigan and director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program. Parthasarathy explains how to think differently about the country’s innovation system—by removing societal bias, rethinking patents, and ensuring equitable access to medical advances—to allow all Americans to thrive.

Read Shobita Parthasarathy’s article, Innovation as a Force for Equity.

Explore more of Parthasarathy’s work by visiting her website.

Check out Parthasarathy’s podcast, The Received Wisdom, a podcast about how to realize the potential of science and technology by challenging the received wisdom.

Visit issues.org for more episodes, conversations and articles. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn! Comments? Questions? Tweet us or email us at [email protected].

The COVID vaccines are highly effective at preventing infection, serious illness, and even death from COVID, but many are hesitant to get vaccinated. Because art is a powerful tool for connecting with communities, building stronger relationships between artists and public health programs may be a way to increase people’s confidence about vaccines. On this episode, cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz and Jill Sonke, director of the Center for Art in Medicine at the University of Florida, join us to explore the question, “What role could artists and culture bearers play in discussions of vaccine confidence?”

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