New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

Howard Chiang’s new book is a masterful study of the relationship between sexual knowledge and Chinese modernity. After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2018) guides readers through the history of eunuchs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the

Drs. Messina and Gill talked about cognitive offloading in our digital age—how smartphones, AI, and other technologies are reshaping our mental habits, our memory, our capacity for attention, and ultimately, our emotional lives. Cognitive offloading refers to the process of using tools and technologies to take over men

It’s the UConn Popcast, and what impact will AI have on being human in the next decade? Elon University’s Center for Imagining the Digital Future just released a big report on this question, based on a survey of nearly 300 global tech experts. These insiders predict major changes in the very near future to the way we t

In 2018, the United States Supreme Court opened the floodgates for states to legalize betting on sports. Eager for revenue, almost forty states have done so. The result is the explosive growth of an industry dominated by companies like FanDuel and DraftKings. One out of every five American adults gambled on sports in 2

Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of farm machinery, fertilizer, seeds, and pesticides are sold to farmers around the world. Although agricultural inputs are a huge sector of the global economy, the lion's share of that market is controlled by a relatively small number of very large transnational corpo

The recent coronavirus pandemic proved that the time-old notion seems now truer than ever: that science and politics represent a clash of cultures. But why should scientists simply “stick to the facts” and leave politics to the politicians when the world seems to be falling down around us? Drawing on his experience as