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International development was revolutionized by experiments and evaluations of its methods. Meta-science can learn from it.
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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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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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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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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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Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence are forcing skeptics to eat their words. We should take its risks seriously too.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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?
