“Reports & Events” is a monthly tip sheet for the news media that highlights selected meetings of interest and reports from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
In addition to killing over a million Americans, Covid-19 revealed embarrassing failures of local, state, and national public health systems to accurately and effectively collect, transmit, and process information. To some critics and reporters, the visible and easily understood face of those failures was the continued use of fax machines.
A recent conference in New Orleans gave participants in the Gulf Scholars Program an opportunity to learn and connect around the theme “What the Gulf Needs Now.” The program prepares undergraduate students to address pressing environmental, health, and other challenges in the Gulf of Mexico region.
At the second Nobel Prize Summit hosted by NAS and the Nobel Prize Foundation, leading scientists, Nobel laureates, business leaders, writers, artists, and young innovators will gather virtually and in person from May 24-26 to explore the problem of misinformation and steps that organizations, policymakers, and citizens can take to repair the information landscape.
A new National Academies report recommends policy changes to reduce opportunity gaps for young children across the U.S. The report focuses on early childhood education, mental health resources, disability services, and equity in access to resources and experiences.
Net metering practices have helped support the wider adoption of distributed electricity generation, such as rooftop solar, but these policies should evolve to reflect the value distributed generation provides to society by reducing use of fossil fuels, enhancing resilience, and improving equity.
Research funded by NIH that uses nonhuman primates is critical to the nation’s ability to respond adequately to public health emergencies and carry out high-impact biomedical research, but gaps in the systems that support research using these animal models are undermining national health emergency readiness.
Read highlights from a recent webinar hosted by the National Academies’ New Voices program, which explored how to make developments in emerging technologies more equitable in multiple fields including artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and energy.
New nuclear reactor concepts could help the U.S. meet its long-term climate goals, but a range of technical, regulatory, economic, and societal challenges must first be overcome. A new report provides recommendations to start laying the foundation required for advanced reactors to become a viable part of the U.S. energy system.
