Science & Technology

Kari A. Bingen and Heather W. Williams write that if Russia plans to deploy nuclear weapons in space to target satellites, the threat is definitely serious—and the U.S. should act fast.

After viewing the movie Oppenheimer, Matthew Bunn, John P. Holdren, Mariana Budjeryn, Matthew J. Parent, Calder Walton, Sylvia Mishra, and Julie George offer their thoughts on its relevance to the world today. 

As inventions go, the Internet stacks up with the best of them: the lightbulb, the automobile, even fire. In its first thirty years, the Internet’s worldwide adoption and breadth of application has exceeded any other technological advance in history. It expands our reach by bringing people, experiences, and things to us with the click of a mouse. It connects us to an increasing number of gadgets, from smartphones to voice kiosks and soon self-driving vehicles that will no doubt converse with us while we commute, happily oblivious to the traffic around us. We revel in our newfound agility and versatility. Importantly, our precious network kept us sane during a worldwide pandemic and enabled the world to work remotely while most of its population was frozen at home. For resilience against catastrophes alone, the Internet has become indispensable.

Juliette Kayyem analyzes the social-media platform's crisis that has become a real-world crisis

In February 2012, the first significant attempt to set mandatory cybersecurity requirements and response plans for critical infrastructure was introduced in Congress. Unfortunately, it was watered down to voluntary standards and failed in the Senate. Opponents of the bill cited fears of overburdening regulations on companies and warnings of over-simplistic box-checking and minimum compliance. Business groups championed the narrative of big government to ensure the bill’s demise — and that narrative persists to this day.

The global demand for desalinated water is increasing at a remarkable rate. In a future with increasing demand for water and low-carbon electricity, an interesting ecological dilemma emerges. In a decarbonized world, providing desalinated water for domestic use and aquatic ecological restoration could increasingly come at the expense of open space lost to renewables such as solar photovoltaics (PV) and wind turbines. In this article we examine the environmental tradeoffs of providing freshwater from desalination under a solar photovoltaic-based decarbonization strategy, using Israel as an example.

Christopher (Chris) Krebs, former Director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), has been named a non-resident Senior Fellow with the Homeland Security Project and the Cyber Project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

In the wake of a series of damaging cyber intrusions on private businesses controlling critical pieces of U.S. infrastructure, Harvard Kennedy School Senior Lecturer Juliette Kayyem says that countering the growing threat will require erasing the "legal fiction" that cyberattacks are different than physical attacks on American civilians.

Following the June 16 Biden-Putin Summit, several Belfer Center experts shared their thoughts on how the meeting might impact the U.S.-Russia relationship. 

H. Holden Thorp interviewed Juliette Kayyem for an editorial on lessons for science communication from the COVID-19 pandemic.