How open supply voting machines might increase belief in US elections

Whereas distributors pitched their newest voting machines in Harmony, New Hampshire, this previous August, election officers requested each type of query: How a lot does the brand new scanner weigh? Are any of its elements made in China?

The solutions weren’t trivial. These machines are a once-in-a-decade buy and plenty of cities in New Hampshire wish to change their present, shoddy machines. However with what? 

The officers’ first choice was to proceed with a legacy vendor. The second was to gamble on VotingWorks, a nonprofit with solely 17 staff which is on the forefront of the motion to make elections extra clear due to its open supply method. However can an idealist nonprofit actually unseat trade juggernauts — and restore religion in democracy alongside the way in which? Learn the total story.

—Spenser Mestel

A plan to carry down drug costs might threaten America’s expertise increase

—Lita Nelsen joined the Know-how Licensing Workplace of the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how in 1986 and was director from 1992 to 2016.

Forty years in the past, Kendall Sq. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was filled with abandoned warehouses and dying low-tech factories. Right now, it’s arguably the middle of the worldwide biotech trade.

Throughout my 30 years in MIT’s Know-how Licensing Workplace, I witnessed this transformation firsthand, and I do know it was no accident. A lot of it was the direct results of the Bayh-Dole Act, a bipartisan legislation that Congress handed in 1980.

The reform enabled world-class universities like MIT and Harvard to retain the rights on discoveries made by their scientists—even when federal funds paid for the analysis. These discoveries, in flip, helped a big variety of biotechnology startups all through the Boston space launch and develop. However the efficacy of the Bayh-Dole Act is now below critical risk. Learn the total story.