Author: The National Academies Press

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Our nation faces the distinct possibility of a catastrophic terrorist attack using an improvised nuclear device (IND), according to international and U.S. intelligence. Detonation of an IND in a major U.S. city would result in tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of victims and would overwhelm public health, emergency response, and health care systems, not to mention creating unprecedented social and economic challenges. While preparing for an IND may seem futile at first glance, thousands of lives can be saved by informed planning and decision making prior to and following an attack.

In 2009, the Institute of Medicine published the proceedings of a workshop assessing the health and medical preparedness for responding to an IND detonation. Since that time, multiple federal and other publications have added layers of detail to this conceptual framework, resulting in a significant body of literature and guidance. However, there has been only limited planning effort at the local level as much of the federal guidance has not been translated into action for states, cities and counties. According to an informal survey of community preparedness by the National Association of City and County Health Officials (NACCHO), planning for a radiation incident ranked lowest in priority among other hazards by 2,800 local health departments.

The focus of Nationwide Response Issues After an Improvised Nuclear Device Attack: Medical and Public Health Considerations for Neighboring Jurisdictions: Workshop Summary is on key response requirements faced by public health and health care systems in response to an IND detonation, especially those planning needs of outlying state and local jurisdictions from the detonation site. The specific meeting objectives were as follows:

– Understand the differences between types of radiation incidents and implications of an IND attack on outlying communities.

-Highlight current planning efforts at the federal, state, and local level as well as challenges to the implementation of operational plans.

-Examine gaps in planning efforts and possible challenges and solutions.

-Identify considerations for public health reception centers: how public health and health care interface with functions and staffing and how radiological assessments and triage be handled.

-Discuss the possibilities and benefits of integration of disaster transport systems.

-Explore roles of regional health care coalitions in coordination of health care response.

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Topics: Health and Medicine | Conflict and Security Issues

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The potential for using fusion energy to produce commercial electric power was first explored in the 1950s. Harnessing fusion energy offers the prospect of a nearly carbon-free energy source with a virtually unlimited supply of fuel. Unlike nuclear fission plants, appropriately designed fusion power plants would not produce the large amounts of high-level nuclear waste that requires long-term disposal. Due to these prospects, many nations have initiated research and development (R&D) programs aimed at developing fusion as an energy source. Two R&D approaches are being explored: magnetic fusion energy (MFE) and inertial fusion energy (IFE).

An Assessment of the Prospects for Inertial Fusion Energy describes and assesses the current status of IFE research in the United States; compares the various technical approaches to IFE; and identifies the scientific and engineering challenges associated with developing inertial confinement fusion (ICF) in particular as an energy source. It also provides guidance on an R&D roadmap at the conceptual level for a national program focusing on the design and construction of an inertial fusion energy demonstration plant.

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Topics: Energy and Energy Conservation | Engineering and Technology | Math, Chemistry and Physics

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The income that supports the activities of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) comes from two major sources: program revenue received from sponsors to pay for the myriad studies and other activities undertaken each year by the National Research Council (NRC), and a much smaller sum that is obtained from our endowment under the endowment spending policies adopted by the Council. The goal of the endowment is to provide stable support for the Academy’s programs and activities. To achieve this goal, the Council, acting on the recommendations of the Finance Committee, has historically authorized spending from the portfolio at a rate designed to maintain the purchasing power of the endowment over time.

This Report of the Treasure of the National Academy of Sciences presents the financial position and results of operations as well as a review of the endowment, trust, and other long-term investments portfolio activities of our Academy for the year ended December 31, 2012. While this book provides essential financial summary to key personnel, it also serves as a vital informative resource for various members of the public, private, and governmental sectors

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Topics:

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On July 26, 2011, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued an advance notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPRM) with the purpose of soliciting comments on how current regulations for protecting research participants could be modernized and revised. The rationale for revising the regulations was as follows: this ANPRM seeks comment on how to better protect human subjects who are involved in research, while facilitating valuable research and reducing burden, delay, and ambiguity for investigators. The current regulations governing human subjects research were developed years ago when research was predominantly conducted at universities, colleges, and medical institutions, and each study generally took place at only a single site. Although the regulations have been amended over the years, they have not kept pace with the evolving human research enterprise, the proliferation of multisite clinical trials and observational studies, the expansion of health services research, research in the social and behavioral sciences, and research involving databases, the Internet, and biological specimen repositories, and the use of advanced technologies, such as genomics.

Proposed Revisions to the Common Rule: Perspectives of Social and Behavioral Scientists: Workshop Summary focuses on six broad topic areas:
1. Evidence on the functioning of the Common Rule and of institutional review boards (IRBs), to provide context for the proposed revisions.
2. The types and levels of risks and harms encountered in social and behavioral sciences, and issues related to the severity and probability of harm, because the ANPRM asks for input on calibration of levels of review to levels of risk.
3. The consent process and special populations, because new rules have been proposed to improve informed consent (e.g., standard consent form, consent for future uses of biospecimens, and re-consenting for further use of existing research data).
4. Issues related to the protection of research participants in studies that involve use of existing data and data sharing, because the ANPRM proposed applying standards for protecting the privacy of healthcare data to research data.
5. Multidisciplinary and multisite studies, because the ANPRM proposed a revision to the regulations that would allow multisite studies to be covered by a single IRB.
6. The purview and roles of IRBs, because the ANPRM included possible revisions to categories of research that could entail changes in IRB oversight.

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Topics: Behavioral and Social Sciences | Education

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A “sustainable society,” according to one definition, “is one that can persist over generations; one that is far-seeing enough, flexible enough, and wise enough not to undermine either its physical or its social system of support.” As the government sector works hard to ensure sufficient fresh water, food, energy, housing, health, and education for the nation without limiting resources for the future generations, it’s clear that there is no sufficient organization to deal with sustainability issues. Each federal agency appears to have a single mandate or a single area of expertise making it difficult to tackle issues such as managing the ecosystem. Key resource domains, which include water, land, energy, and nonrenewable resources, for example, are nearly-completely connected yet different agencies exist to address only one aspect of these domains.

The legendary ecologist John Muir wrote in 1911 that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” Thus, in order for the nation to be successful in sustaining its resources, “linkages” will need to be built among federal, state, and local governments; nongovernmental organizations (NGOs); and the private sector. The National Research Council (NRC) was asked by several federal agencies, foundations, and the private sector to provide guidance to the federal government on issues related to sustainability linkages. The NRC assigned the task to as committee with a wide range of expertise in government, academia, and business. The committee held public fact-finding meetings to hear from agencies and stakeholder groups; examined sustainability management examples; conducted extensive literature reviews; and more to address the issue. Sustainability for the Nation: Resource Connection and Governance Linkages is the committee’s report on the issue.

The report includes insight into high-priority areas for governance linkages, the challenges of managing connected systems, impediments to successful government linkages, and more. The report also features examples of government linkages which include Adaptive Management on the Platte River, Philadelphia’s Green Stormwater Infrastructure, and Managing Land Use in the Mojave.

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Topics: Policy for Science and Technology | Energy and Energy Conservation

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Spurred on by new discoveries and rapid technological advances, the capacity for life science research is expanding across the globe—and with it comes concerns about the unintended impacts of research on the physical and biological environment, human well-being, or the deliberate misuse of knowledge, tools, and techniques to cause harm. This report describes efforts to address dual use issues by developing institutes around the world that will help life sciences faculty learn to teach about the responsible conduct of science. Based on the successful National Academies Summer Institute for Undergraduate Biology Education and on previous NRC reports on effective methods for teaching about dual use issues, the report’s authoring committee designed a general framework for the faculty institutes and chose the Middle East-North Africa (MENA) region to test a prototype faculty institute.

In September 2012, the first Institute was held in Aqaba, Jordan, bringing together 28 participants from Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Libya, and Yemen to engage with effective, evidence-based teaching methods, develop curricular materials for use in their own classrooms, and become community leaders on dual use and related topics. Developing Capacities for Teaching Responsible Science in the MENA Region: Refashioning Scientific Dialogue offers insights from the institute that will help in the design and implementation of future programs in the MENA region, and in other parts of the world.

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Topics: | Education

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From Facebook to Google searches to bookmarking a webpage in our browsers, today’s society has become one with an enormous amount of data. Some internet-based companies such as Yahoo! are even storing exabytes (10 to the 18 bytes) of data. Like these companies and the rest of the world, scientific communities are also generating large amounts of data-—mostly terabytes and in some cases near petabytes—from experiments, observations, and numerical simulation. However, the scientific community, along with defense enterprise, has been a leader in generating and using large data sets for many years. The issue that arises with this new type of large data is how to handle it—this includes sharing the data, enabling data security, working with different data formats and structures, dealing with the highly distributed data sources, and more.

Frontiers in Massive Data Analysis presents the Committee on the Analysis of Massive Data’s work to make sense of the current state of data analysis for mining of massive sets of data, to identify gaps in the current practice and to develop methods to fill these gaps. The committee thus examines the frontiers of research that is enabling the analysis of massive data which includes data representation and methods for including humans in the data-analysis loop. The report includes the committee’s recommendations, details concerning types of data that build into massive data, and information on the seven computational giants of massive data analysis.

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Topics: Math, Chemistry and Physics

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The U.S. government supports programs to combat global HIV/AIDS through an initiative that is known as the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). This initiative was originally authorized in the U.S. Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Act of 2003 and focused on an emergency response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic to deliver lifesaving care and treatment in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) with the highest burdens of disease. It was subsequently reauthorized in the Tom Lantos and Henry J. Hyde U.S. Global Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Reauthorization Act of 2008 (the Lantos-Hyde Act).

Evaluation of PEPFAR makes recommendations for improving the U.S. government’s bilateral programs as part of the U.S. response to global HIV/AIDS. The overall aim of this evaluation is a forward-looking approach to track and anticipate the evolution of the U.S. response to global HIV to be positioned to inform the ability of the U.S. government to address key issues under consideration at the time of the report release.

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Topics: Health and Medicine

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TRB Special Report 311: Effects of Diluted Bitumen on Crude Oil Transmission Pipelines analyzes whether shipments of diluted bitumen have a greater likelihood of release from pipelines than shipments of other crude oils. The oil sands region of Canada is the source of diluted bitumen shipped by pipeline to the United States.

The committee that produced the report did not find any pipeline failures unique to the transportation of diluted bitumen or evidence of physical or chemical properties of diluted bitumen shipments that are outside the range of those of other crude oil shipments. The committee’s comprehensive review did not find evidence of any specific aspect of the transportation of diluted bitumen that would make it more likely than other crude oils to cause pipeline releases.

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Topics: Transportation

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In 2006 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) established the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) Program, recognizing the need for a new impetus to encourage clinical and translational research. At the time it was very difficult to translate basic and clinical research into clinical and community practice; making it difficult for individual patients and communities to receive its benefits. Since its creation the CTSA Program has expanded, with 61 sites spread across the nation’s academic health centers and other institutions, hoping to provide catalysts and test beds for policies and practices that can benefit clinical and translation research organizations throughout the country.

The NIH contracted with the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 2012 to conduct a study to assess and provide recommendations on appropriateness of the CTSA Program’s mission and strategic goals and whether changes were needed. The study was also address the implementation of the program by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) while exploring the CTSA’s contributions in the acceleration of the development of new therapeutics. A 13-member committee was established to head this task; the committee had collective expertise in community outreach and engagement, public health and health policy, bioethics, education and training, pharmaceutical research and development, program evaluation, clinical and biomedical research, and child health research.

The CTSA Program at NIH: Opportunities for Advancing Clinical and Translational Research is the result of investigations into previous program evaluations and assessments, open-session meetings and conference class, and the review of scientific literature. Overall, the committee believes that the CTSA Program is significant to the advancement of clinical and translational research through its contributions. The Program would benefit from a variety of revisions, however, to make it more efficient and effective.

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Topics: Health and Medicine

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Health care quality and its affordability have become very pressing issues in the United States. All sectors of the country are attempting to push forward initiatives that will improve the health care system as well as the health of the American population in general. Despite the economical dedication to health care, about 1/5, the system remains uneven and fragmented, patient harm is quite common, care is often uncoordinated, and many more mishaps occur. There exists many obstacles to improve the nation’s health care system; these include the capacity to reliably and consistently measure progress. In 2006 the Institute of Medicine (IOM) established the Roundtable on Value & Science-Driven Health Care which has since accelerated the development of a learning health system- one in which science, informatics, incentives, and culture are aligned to create a continuous learning loop. This learning loop would thus help make the health care system better.

In response, the IOM organized a 2-day workshop to explore in depth the core measurement needs for population health, health care quality, and health care costs. The workshop hoped to gain a full understanding of how to improve the nation’s measurement capacity to track progress in the health care system. Having this knowledge would help the nation get one step closer to the creation of an efficient learning loop.

The workshop was divided into a series of sessions that focused on different aspects of measurement. Core Measurement Needs for Better Care, Better Health, and Lower Costs: Counting What Counts: Workshop Summary includes explanations and key details for these sessions: Vision, Current Measurement Capabilities, Specifying the Shape of a Core Metric Set, and Implementation. The report also features common themes within these areas, the workshop agenda, and information about those involved.

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Topics: Health and Medicine

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Technology has revolutionized many aspects of modern life, from how businesses operate, to how people get information, to how countries wage war. Certain technologies in particular, including not only cell phones and the Internet but also satellites, drones, and sensors of various kinds, are transforming the work of mitigating conflict and building peaceful societies. Rapid increases in the capabilities and availability of digital technologies have put powerful communications devices in the hands of most of the world’s population.

These technologies enable one-to-one and one-to-many flows of information, connecting people in conflict settings to individuals and groups outside those settings and, conversely, linking humanitarian organizations to people threatened by violence. Communications within groups have also intensified and diversified as the group members use new technologies to exchange text, images, video, and audio. Monitoring and analysis of the flow and content of this information can yield insights into how violence can be prevented or mitigated. In this way technologies and the resulting information can be used to detect and analyze, or sense, impending conflict or developments in ongoing conflict.

On October 11, 2012, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) held a workshop in Washington, DC, to identify “major opportunities and impediments to providing better real-time information to actors directly involved in situations that could lead to deadly violence.” The workshop brought together experts in technology, experts in peacebuilding, and people who have worked at the intersections of those two fields on the applications of technology in conflict settings, to consider uses of technology to sense emerging and ongoing conflicts and provide information and analyses that can be used to prevent violent and deadly conflict. Sensing and Shaping Emerging Conflicts: Report of a Joint Workshop of the National Academy of Engineering and the United States Institute of Peace: Roundtable on Technology, Science, and Peacebuilding summarizes the workshop.

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Topics: Engineering and Technology | Conflict and Security Issues

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Adapting to a Changing World was commissioned by the National Science Foundation to examine the present status of undergraduate physics education, including the state of physics education research, and, most importantly, to develop a series of recommendations for improving physics education that draws from the knowledge we have about learning and effective teaching. Our committee has endeavored to do so, with great interest and more than a little passion.

The Committee on Undergraduate Physics Education Research and Implementation was established in 2010 by the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Research Council. This report summarizes the committee’s response to its statement of task, which requires the committee to produce a report that identifies the goals and challenges facing undergraduate physics education and identifies how best practices for undergraduate physics education can be implemented on a widespread and sustained basis, assess the status of physics education research (PER) and discuss how PER can assist in accomplishing the goal of improving undergraduate physics education best practices and education policy.

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Topics: Education

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For those in the broad engineering community those who employ, work with, and/or educate engineers, and engineers themselves there is no need to explain the importance and value of engineering. They understand that engineers help make the world a better place for all, that they regularly grapple with important societal and environmental issues, and that the engineering process is every bit as creative as composing a symphony or crafting a piece of art. But the situation outside the engineering community is quite different. Studies have shown that most K 12 students and teachers have a limited appreciation of all the ways that engineering makes their lives better and, furthermore, that they have little understanding of what engineers do or of the opportunities that an engineering education offers.

Messaging for Engineering supports efforts by the engineering community to communicate more effectively about the profession and those who practice it. This report builds on the 2008 NAE publication, Changing the Conversation: Messages for Improving Public Understanding of Engineering (CTC), which presented the results of a research-based effort to develop and test new, more effective messages about engineering.

The new messages cast engineering as inherently creative and concerned with human welfare, as well as an emotionally satisfying calling. This report summarizes progress in implementing the CTC messages, but also recognizes that there is potential to galvanize additional action and thus suggests specific steps for major players in the engineering community to continue and build on progress to date. Many of the report’s recommendations resulted from discussion at a December 2010 committee workshop that involved several dozen high-level decision makers representing key stakeholder groups in the engineering community.

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Topics: Engineering and Technology

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The U.S. Congress charged the National Academies with conducting a review of the Internal Revenue Code to identify the types of and specific tax provisions that have the largest effects on carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions and to estimate the magnitude of those effects. To address such a broad charge, the National Academies appointed a committee composed of experts in tax policy, energy and environmental modeling, economics, environmental law, climate science, and related areas.

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Topics: Industry and Labor | Environment and Environmental Studies

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In the fall of 2010, the Office of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Secretary for Science asked for a National Research Council (NRC) committee to investigate the prospects for generating power using inertial confinement fusion (ICF) concepts, acknowledging that a key test of viability for this concept—ignition —could be demonstrated at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in the relatively near term. The committee was asked to provide an unclassified report. However, DOE indicated that to fully assess this topic, the committee’s deliberations would have to be informed by the results of some classified experiments and information, particularly in the area of ICF targets and nonproliferation. Thus, the Panel on the Assessment of Inertial Confinement Fusion Targets (“the panel”) was assembled, composed of experts able to access the needed information. The panel was charged with advising the Committee on the Prospects for Inertial Confinement Fusion Energy Systems on these issues, both by internal discussion and by this unclassified report.

A Panel on Fusion Target Physics (“the panel”) will serve as a technical resource to the Committee on Inertial Confinement Energy Systems (“the Committee”) and will prepare a report that describes the R&D challenges to providing suitable targets, on the basis of parameters established and provided to the Panel by the Committee. The Panel on Fusion Target Physics will prepare a report that will assess the current performance of fusion targets associated with various ICF concepts in order to understand:
1. The spectrum output; 2. The illumination geometry; 3. The high-gain geometry; and 4. The robustness of the target design. The panel addressed the potential impacts of the use and development of current concepts for Inertial Fusion Energy on the proliferation of nuclear weapons information and technology, as appropriate. The Panel examined technology options, but does not provide recommendations specific to any currently operating or proposed ICF facility.

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Topics: Energy and Energy Conservation | Engineering and Technology | Math, Chemistry and Physics

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Most of the policy discussion about stimulating innovation has focused on the federal level. This study focuses on the significant activity at the state level, with the goal of improving the public’s understanding of key policy strategies and exemplary practices. Based on a series of workshops and conferences that brought together policymakers along with leaders of industry and academia in a select number of states, the study highlights a rich variety of policy initiatives underway at the state and regional level to foster knowledge based growth and employment. Perhaps what distinguishes this effort at the state level is most of all the high degree of pragmatism. Operating out of necessity, innovation policies at the state level often involve taking advantage of existing resources and recombining them in new ways, forging innovative partnerships among universities, industry and government organizations, growing the skill base, and investing in the infrastructure to develop new technologies and new industries. Many of these initiatives are being guided by leaders from the private sector and universities.

The objective of Best Practices in State and Regional Innovation Initiatives: Competing in the 21st Century is not to do an empirical review of the inputs and outputs of various state programs. Nor is it to evaluate which programs are superior. Indeed, some of the notable successes, such as the Albany nanotechnology cluster, represent a leap of leadership, investment, and sustained commitment that has had remarkable results in an industry that is actively pursued by many countries. The study’s goal is to illustrate the approaches taken by a variety of highly diverse states as they confront the increasing challenges of global competition for the industries and jobs of today and tomorrow.

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Topics: Industry and Labor

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The material that sustains the nuclear reactions that produce energy can also be used to make nuclear weapons—and therefore, the development of nuclear energy is one of multiple pathways to proliferation for a non-nuclear weapon state. There is a tension between the development of future nuclear fuel cycles and managing the risk of proliferation as the number of existing and future nuclear energy systems expands throughout the world. As the Department of Energy (DOE) and other parts of the government make decisions about future nuclear fuel cycles, DOE would like to improve proliferation assessments to better inform those decisions.

Improving the Assessment of the Proliferation Risk of Nuclear Fuel Cycles considers how the current methods of quantification of proliferation risk are being used and implemented, how other approaches to risk assessment can contribute to improving the utility of assessments for policy and decision makers. The study also seeks to understand the extent to which technical analysis of proliferation risk could be improved for policy makers through research and development.

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Topics: Energy and Energy Conservation

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Using Science to Improve the BLM Wild Horse and Burro Program: A Way Forward reviews the science that underpins the Bureau of Land Management’s oversight of free-ranging horses and burros on federal public lands in the western United States, concluding that constructive changes could be implemented. The Wild Horse and Burro Program has not used scientifically rigorous methods to estimate the population sizes of horses and burros, to model the effects of management actions on the animals, or to assess the availability and use of forage on rangelands.

Evidence suggests that horse populations are growing by 15 to 20 percent each year, a level that is unsustainable for maintaining healthy horse populations as well as healthy ecosystems. Promising fertility-control methods are available to help limit this population growth, however. In addition, science-based methods exist for improving population estimates, predicting the effects of management practices in order to maintain genetically diverse, healthy populations, and estimating the productivity of rangelands. Greater transparency in how science-based methods are used to inform management decisions may help increase public confidence in the Wild Horse and Burro Program.

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Topics: Agriculture

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In 2010, more than 105,000 people were injured or killed in the United States as the result of a firearm-related incident. Recent, highly publicized, tragic mass shootings in Newtown, CT; Aurora, CO; Oak Creek, WI; and Tucson, AZ, have sharpened the American public’s interest in protecting our children and communities from the harmful effects of firearm violence. While many Americans legally use firearms for a variety of activities, fatal and nonfatal firearm violence poses a serious threat to public safety and welfare.

In January 2013, President Barack Obama issued 23 executive orders directing federal agencies to improve knowledge of the causes of firearm violence, what might help prevent it, and how to minimize its burden on public health. One of these orders directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to, along with other federal agencies, immediately begin identifying the most pressing problems in firearm violence research. The CDC and the CDC Foundation asked the IOM, in collaboration with the National Research Council, to convene a committee tasked with developing a potential research agenda that focuses on the causes of, possible interventions to, and strategies to minimize the burden of firearm-related violence. Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence focuses on the characteristics of firearm violence, risk and protective factors, interventions and strategies, the impact of gun safety technology, and the influence of video games and other media.

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Topics: Behavioral and Social Sciences | Health and Medicine