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  • Viktor

    MEET VIKTOR

    Although Viktor Zhdanov's name is little known today, he spearheaded one of the greatest projects in history. Who was he and what did he do?

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  • Words by Paul Niehaus & Heidi Williams

    Developing the science of science

    Words by Paul Niehaus & Heidi Williams

    International development was revolutionized by experiments and evaluations of its methods. Meta-science can learn from it.

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  • Words by Richard Williamson

    Pandemic prevention as fire-fighting

    Words by Richard Williamson

    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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  • Words by Mathias Kirk Bonde

    Advancing antivenom

    Words by Mathias Kirk Bonde

    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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  • Words by Patrick McKenzie (patio11)

    The story of VaccinateCA

    Words by Patrick McKenzie (patio11)

    Nobody had a plan to get vaccines out of freezers and into Americans’ arms–except VaccinateCA. Its CEO tells the story of how a small team brought order to a chaotic rollout.

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  • Words by Stephen Davies

    History is in the making

    Words by Stephen Davies

    Though we tend to see history as just one political event after another, it’s technology and ideas, not politics, that change our lives the most. History should reflect that.

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  • Words by Séb Krier

    AI from Superintelligence to ChatGPT

    Words by Séb Krier

    Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence are forcing skeptics to eat their words. We should take its risks seriously too.

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  • Words by Étienne Fortier-Dubois

    The elements of scientific style

    Words by Étienne Fortier-Dubois

    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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  • Words by Ryan Murphy & Colin O’Reilly

    Anti-growth safetyism

    Words by Ryan Murphy & Colin O’Reilly

    Is a build up of generic regulations together causing us to be three times poorer than we need to be? Probably not. But the insidious rise of risk aversion is still a big drag on economic growth.

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  • Words by Tamara Winter

    Interview: J. Storrs Hall on getting lost in stagnation

    Words by Tamara Winter

    Stripe Press’s Tamara Winter sits down with J. Storrs Hall, whose book ‘Where is My Flying Car’ inspired this issue, to talk about stagnation and the possibility of progress.

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  • Words by Benjamin Reinhardt

    Making energy too cheap to meter

    Words by Benjamin Reinhardt

    The great slowdown began when we started rationing energy. Restarting progress means getting energy that is so abundant that it’s almost free.

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  • Words by Eli Dourado

    Nanotechnology’s spring

    Words by Eli Dourado

    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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  • Words by Adam Hunt

    There was no great stagnation

    Words by Adam Hunt

    We may not have flying cars or cheap, abundant energy. But we do have incredible information technology that we take for granted – and we’re mismeasuring the huge aggregate benefits it is having.

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  • Words by Brian Potter

    Planes, claims and automobiles

    Words by Brian Potter

    Americans famously love to sue one another. Are out of control product liability lawsuits the to blame for the crash of the personal aviation industry?

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  • Words by Stripe Press

    Film: The Street Network

    Words by Stripe Press

    A documentary from Stripe Press that follows the evolution of a rudimentary gaming network between friends in Cuba into a DIY internet that serviced most of the island.

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  • Words by Stewart Brand

    THE MAINTENANCE RACE

    Words by Stewart Brand

    The world’s first round-the-world solo yacht race was a thrilling and, for some, deadly contest. How its participants maintained their vessels can help us understand just how fundamental maintenance is.

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  • Words by Davis Kedrosky

    The decline and fall of the British economy

    Words by Davis Kedrosky

    When America’s economy overtook Britain’s a century ago, it remade the world order. How it happened is still debated – but might help us understand whether China could do the same to America today.

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  • Words by Saloni Dattani

    Real peer review has never been tried

    Words by Saloni Dattani

    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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  • Words by Jason Collins

    We don’t have a hundred biases, we have the wrong model

    Words by Jason Collins

    Behavioral economics has identified dozens of cognitive biases that stop us from acting ‘rationally’. But instead of building up a messier and messier picture of human behavior, we need a new model.

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  • Words by Carlton Reid

    Reclaiming the roads

    Words by Carlton Reid

    Until recently, roads were shared between a messy mix of cyclists, stagecoaches, carts, horses, and pedestrians, with no dominant user. After decades of the car being supreme, we can return to equality on the street.

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  • Words by Léa Zinsli

    Age of the bacteriophage

    Words by Léa Zinsli

    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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  • Words by Anton Howes

    Why innovation prizes fail

    Words by Anton Howes

    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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  • Words by Audrey Schulman

    Local warming

    Words by Audrey Schulman

    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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  • Words by Michael Dnes

    London’s lost ringways

    Words by Michael Dnes

    A monstrous plan to build major motorways through some of London’s greatest neighborhoods fell apart. But the price was the birth of the NIMBY movement, and a permanent ceiling on Britain’s infrastructure ambitions.

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  • Words by Virginia Postrel

    How polyester bounced back

    Words by Virginia Postrel

    Somehow, polyester went from being the world’s most hated fabrics to one of its favorites. It reinvented itself thanks to advances in materials science, and did it so successfully that many people don’t even realize they’re wearing polyester today.

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  • Words by Ben Southwood

    Scientific slowdown is not inevitable

    Words by Ben Southwood

    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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