Issue 20

Radiology combines digital images, clear benchmarks, and repeatable tasks. But replacing humans with AI is harder than it seems.

America’s food banks had a broken distribution system. University of Chicago economists fixed it.

The world is warming faster than we can cut emissions. Volcanoes are already cooling the planet, with particles that reflect sunlight. Maybe we can too.

Antibody therapies are four of the world’s ten best selling drugs. If they were cheaper, they could prevent millions of deaths from rabies, malaria, and dengue.

Science has forgotten that the greatest breakthroughs often come from outsiders who are able to take a fresh perspective.

Chinese dams will hold billions of people downstream to ransom. Could solar-powered desalination make them irrelevant?

Systems thinking promises to give us a toolkit to design complex systems that work from the ground up. It fails because it ignores an important fact: systems fight back.

France built 40 nuclear reactors in a decade. Here’s how they did it, and how the world can follow their lead today.