Science & Technology

After worldwide calls to action in the wake of the tsunami that devastated Fukushima Daiichi in March 2011, nuclear power plants have been shoring up their defenses for more than a year. Much has already been accomplished; many projects are only months away from realization. The end of 2013 marks the deadline for many countries’ medium-term actions. This article provides a country-by-country report which aims to give an overview of actions taken in most countries operating nuclear power plants.

In recent years the major focus of China’s engagement in Africa has been on economic diplomacy. Much of this debate has been influenced by concerns over China’s rise as an economic superpower and the preoccupation with viewing Africa through the jaded natural resource lens. A closer look at Africa’s growing economic diplomacy reveals a more complex picture involving other important emerging market economies as illustrated by economic relations with Brazil. Africa’s relations with Brazil highlight the emergence of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) as a new economic alliance that is reshaping international trading relations.

  Critics of agricultural biotechnology have long contended that it would not benefit farmers in developing countries. Their concerns were not unjustified. A large number of technologies continue to be restricted to industrialized countries despite their global relevance. Farmers in developing countries, however, are bridging the “biotechnology divide.” According to a new report by Clive James of the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA), “For the first time, developing countries grew more, 52% of global biotech crops in 2012 than industrialized countries at 48%.

Africa’s economic growth outlook has come into sharp focus recently. Some analysts have argued that claims about “Africa Rising” are a myth. Others argue that Africa’s growth is underestimated. These contrasting views, however, pay little attention to major trends that are shaping the continent: deepening regional integration; shifting trade relations; and the rise of technocratic presidencies. Deepening Regional Integration African economies are generally viewed as being too dependent on global trends.

"Nearly two decades of propaganda and advocacy based on questionable scientific evidence forced many countries to forego the benefits of a new technology even before its merits had been assessed. In effect, these restrictions have introduced a new class of risks associated with not being able adopt a new technology even where it would confer benefits to farmers, consumers, and industrialists."

"...[O]ne of the fundamental challenges for scientists today is how to communicate basic and vital safety information about the threats we face....Numerical scales work....The public does not need to grasp all the details of the science behind changes to the scale. It just needs a way to know, and process, what is normal, heightened, and extreme danger. This is particularly true given that biological threats are invisible, causing a type of fear distinct from those we can feel or see."

Last month the Council on Foreign Relations published a report co-authored by Joel I. Klein and Condoleezza Rice, titled, “U.S. Education Reform and National Security.” Giving voice to the work of its task force of 25 scholars and practitioners, the report sounded a call to arms from its opening sentence. “It will come as no surprise to most readers,” Klein and Rice wrote, “that America’s primary and secondary schools are widely seen as failing.” With that swift assertion the authors traveled quickly to their destination: we must test, have standards, and audit.

Inequality between men and women remains one of the most critical sources of low economic productivity in Africa. Many of the efforts seek to address the challenge by creating new training institutions. A complementary strategy is to identify and upgrade promising local initiatives. In her preface to the new Gender Equality and Female Empowerment, of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Secretary of State Hillary Clinton states that achieving US global development objectives “will demand accelerated efforts to achieve gender equality and women’s empowerment.

The history of technology is filled with people examining a genuinely new innovation and seeing it simply as an extension of something familiar.  For example, the automobile was originally termed a “horseless carriage.”  When a camera was invented capable of providing the illusion of motion, the product was termed “motion pictures”; many people used the device to film plays on stage.  The desktop computer was originally seen as a kind of digital typewriter, and new staff roles were created in organizations for “word processing” specialists who were expert typists.

"...[T]he board is made up of scientists and has no enforcement power. The government does, and the board’s position should be seen as a plea to the journals to avoid a showdown with national-security officials who are understandably concerned with biological weapons. The absence of a globally enforceable Biological Weapons Convention (the United States withdrew its support in 2001) means that each nation, individually, must monitor itself."