Explore the vast range of titles available.

Healthy food labels tout health benefits, yet most people prioritize tastiness in the moment of food choice. In a preregistered intervention, we tested whether taste-focused labels compared with health-focused labels increased vegetable intake at five university dining halls throughout the United States. Across 137,842 diner decisions, 185 days, and 24 vegetable types, taste-focused labels increased vegetable selection by 29% compared with health-focused labels and by 14% compared with basic labels. Vegetable consumption also increased. Supplementary studies further probed the mediators, moderators, and boundaries of these effects. Increased expectations of a positive taste experience mediated the effect of taste-focused labels on vegetable selection. Moderation tests revealed greater effects in settings that served tastier vegetable recipes. Taste-focused labels outperformed labels that merely contained positive words, fancy words, or lists of ingredients. Together, these studies show that emphasizing tasty and enjoyable attributes increases vegetable intake in real-world settings in which vegetables compete with less healthy options.

Nanotechnology promises to transform the materials of everyday life, leading to smaller and more powerful computers, more durable plastics and fabrics, cheap and effective water purification systems, more efficient solar panels and storage batteries, and medical devices capable of tracking down and killing cancer cells or treating neurological diseases. Policy analysts predict a radical change in the industrial sector; at present, the U.S. government spends nearly $2 billion annually on nanotechnology research and development. Yet the nanotechnology revolution is not straightforward. Enthusiasm about nanotechnology's future is tempered by recognition of the hurdles to its responsible development, including the capacity of government to support technological innovation and economic growth while also addressing potential environmental and public health impacts. This is the first volume to engage scholarly perspectives on environmental regulation in light of the challenges posed by nanotechnology. Contributors focus on the overarching lessons of decades of regulatory response, while posing a fundamental question: How can government regulatory systems satisfy the desire for scientific innovation while also taking into account the direct and indirect effects of 21st century emerging technologies, particularly in the face of scientific uncertainties? With perspectives from economics, history, philosophy, and public policy, this new resource illuminates the various challenges inherent in the development of nanotechnology and works towards a reconceptualization of government regulatory approaches.

The 2011 National Nanotechnology Initiative’s Environmental Health and Safety Research Strategy stressed the need for research to integrate life cycle considerations into risk management and, then, to better integrate risk assessment into decisionmaking on environmental, health, and safety (EHS) dimensions of nanomanufacturing. This paper reviews scholarly articles published 2010–2015 that in some way apply life cycle analysis to nanotechnology to assess the extent to which current research reflects the priorities lain out in the NNI report. As the NNI’s focus was primarily on the “responsible development of nanotechnology” we also focus our examination on the ways in which LCA, in concert with other methodologies, can provide utility to decision makers facing the challenge of implementing that broad goal. We explore some of the challenges and opportunities inherent in using LCA, a tool built to optimize manufacturing decisions, as a guide for policy formulation or tool for policy implementation.

This paper analyzes scholarly papers published from 2003 through 2013 on the general theme of nanotechnology and governance. It considers three general points: (1) the “problem” of nanotechnology; (2) general lessons for governance obtained; and (3) prospects for aligning the US regulatory system to the next generation of complex engineered nano-materials. It argues that engineered nano-materials and products are coming to market within an already mature regulatory framework of decade-old statutes, long-standing bureaucratic rules and routines, narrowly directive judicial decisions, and embedded institutional norms. That extant regulatory regime shapes how policymakers perceive, define, and address the relative benefits and risks of both proximate and yet-to-be idealized nano-materials and applications. The paper concludes that fundamental reforms in the extant regime are unlikely short of a perceived crisis.

The political science literature on interest groups, particularly since Olson (1965), normally focuses on individual motivations to join groups or the incentives offered by groups to entice prospective members to join and, more important, to stay on as members over time. But what happens to our understanding about “members”—a term freighted with overtones of democratic participation—when these individuals are more likely to be passive “supporters” or “donors”? Is there a conceptual and practical distinction between the two? This article ponders this question by examining the advocacy organizations that comprise the national environmental community.

In today's technologically driven world, wireless communication has become ubiquitous, and the demand for faster data rates and the ability to support the ever-growing number of devices is higher than ever. The conventional spectrum is overcrowded, motivating research in utilizing higher frequency bands. As new developments in device and physical layer technologies become more accessible, frequencies above 100~GHz show promise to relieve spectrum congestion and enable new high-bandwidth applications that cannot be supported within the current spectrum. Despite the lack of traditional communication systems at these frequencies until very recently, the spectrum above 100~GHz has already been utilized for passive sensing applications, namely, in Earth-exploration satellite services (EESS) with highly sensitive detectors. In order to coexist with these passive users of the spectrum without harmful interference, spread spectrum techniques are proposed as a method to exploit the large available bandwidth at these frequencies while maintaining high data rates and adding an element of security. In this thesis, a direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) communication system for THz band frequencies is designed, numerically studied and experimentally tested. Successful generation, transmission, and reception of DSSS signals at 1.02 THz and DSSS signals at 130~GHz coexisting with narrowband interference is demonstrated. Finally, as a study case, the requirements of a DSSS on-the-ground THz backhaul system are derived to ensure coexistence with THz EESS systems.

We report on an unusually frank and wide-ranging discussion concerning nano-manufacturing environmental health and safety, between industry and government representatives, insurers and litigators, and experts in life cycle and risk analysis, held at the Boston meeting of the Sustainable Nanotechnology Organization in November 2014. By transitioning from a standard conference panel presentation with audience Q&A to a forum in which each of the two dozen stakeholders in the room was invited to briefly identify themselves and share their expertise and concerns, key understandings emerged along with more nuanced thinking about a broader range of factors influencing industry decision-making and investment, public perception, and government regulation. Industry representatives and advisors who had initially arrived at the session in “observer mode” spoke frankly about the dilemmas of pursuing innovative nanotechnologies with real potential for societal benefit in a climate of regulatory and legal uncertainty. This was a “conversation that has never happened before,” noted one experienced participant, and it left many others hopeful that future stakeholder forums could accelerate the quest to achieve reasonable frameworks for safe governance of emerging technologies.

The social context issues associated with nanotechnology concern unequal access to resources and opportunities, institutionalized and non-institutionalized discrimination, differential social and political power, corporate influence and lack of accountability, inadequate governmental capacity for regulation, challenges to individual rights and autonomy, marginalization of noneconomic values, technology control and oversight, the role of technology in creating and solving problems, and more generally, those aspects of our society and institutions that fail to meet reasonable standards of justice.

This article addresses a key question emerging from this project based at the University of Minnesota: the fundamental capacity of government to engage in “dynamic oversight” of emergent technologies. This conception of oversight requires additional or new types of capacity for government agencies that must arbitrate conflicts and endow any outcomes with necessary democratic legitimacy. Rethinking oversight thus also requires consideration of the fundamental design and organizational capacity of the regulatory regime in the democratic state.