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The House Appropriations Committee has approved the Fiscal Year 2027 Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies Appropriations Act. The bill provides a total discretionary allocation of $189.3 billion, which is 3% below the FY 2026 level. While the bill includes several increases to medical research, it also codifies some significant reductions and…

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a 400-page document last week outlining proposed revisions to the administration of federal awards. The document proposes expanding agency authority to monitor awards from pre-application through closeout and increasing the influence of political appointees and the White House over award decisions.  “The OMB’s proposed rule is an…

Agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and NASA are reportedly imposing new limitations on international scientific collaborations. NIH is allegedly directing grantees to ask permission for any co-authorship with a scholar affiliated with a foreign institution, while NASA has reportedly told some grantees that papers co-authored with researchers in China may violate…

Nature issued new guidelines expanding the types of research and research fields that can use the Registered Report format.  Registered Reports are a format for empirical articles in which the hypotheses, methods and planned analyses undergo peer review before the research is conducted. Previously, Nature only considered these reports for confirmatory research in cognitive neuroscience…

During the 2018 to 2020 Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the U.S. was the largest single-country donor to the response, investing over $516 million in various mitigation measures. Similarly, in the 2014 to 2015 outbreak in West Africa, the U.S. government allocated approximately $2.4 billion to the response.  So far,…

Federal funding cuts are affecting scientists across the country. In academia, cuts are causing budget reductions, termination of ongoing research and disruption to the talent pipeline.  Universities are facing a 15% cap on facilities and administrative cost reimbursements. Usually, the government reimburses universities for about 60% of these indirect costs. Now, universities like UConn expect…

The U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies approved a bill proposing slimmer cuts to science agencies than those proposed in President Donald Trump’s proposed FY 2027 budget. The bill would still leave the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the…

President Donald Trump fired all 22 members of the National Science Board, which oversees the National Science Foundation and guides the president and Congress on science policy, via email on Friday.  The board was created in 1950 to advise the administration on science and engineering policy and approve major funding awards. It is usually made…

The deadline for the Trump administration to petition the Supreme Court to slash federal support for science funding has passed without action from the administration. This could end a 14-month standoff over a policy to reduce the rate of reimbursement for indirect costs on federal grants.  The 14-month standoff The issue began with a decision…

The Korea Institute of Energy Research (KIER) and top U.S. National Laboratories formalize a roadmap to integrate AI into the global energy transition. The KIER, Korea’s only government-funded energy research institute, held workshops from March 23 to 30 with leading U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories—the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the National…

A study in Science Advances maps the landscape of innovation to identify disruptive studies and patents that challenge existing paradigms and inspire waves of follow-up research. The most widely used metric for tracking progress in science, the CD index, focuses on a paper’s local citation patterns, meaning it looks at whether papers citing a focal…

President Donald Trump appointed the first members to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) last week. PCAST was established by an executive order in January to advise the president on “matters involving science, technology, education and technical information.” The council members are: Marc Andreessen, Sergey Brin, Safra Catz, Michael Dell, Jacob…

In 2025, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) unexpectedly terminated 2,291 active research grants, totaling $2.45 billion. A new study documents how the cancellations varied by gender and career stage, finding that early-career investigators and women were disproportionately affected. The study found that the cuts were likely most detrimental for early-stage researchers, who have fewer…

At least 1 in 10 medicines in low- and middle-income countries are substandard or falsified. A 2023 UNODC assessment estimated 267,000 deaths per year from falsified antimalarials alone in sub-Saharan Africa, with nearly 170,000 more from counterfeit antibiotics. In the U.S., the problem is smaller in scale but growing: the CDC has warned about counterfeit…

Legionella culture, the internationally accepted reference method for detecting the bacteria behind Legionnaires’ disease in water systems, still relies on laboratories preparing their own selective media or sourcing it from multiple suppliers. The workflow is well-standardized (ISO 11731 defines it), but the media preparation step remains a source of variability and lab time that ready-to-use…

Basecamp Research, an AI lab for biological design, today announced the launch of the Trillion Gene Atlas, a scientific initiative to generate and model biological data at the trillion-gene scale. The initiative is a collaboration with Anthropic, Ultima Genomics and PacBio and is powered by NVIDIA AI infrastructure.  The Trillion Gene Atlas aims to expand…

At a Glance: The MYF Shift Incremental (Old Way) Paid in annual installments High risk during government shutdowns Carryover requires NIH approval Forward Funded (New Way) Total 5-year budget paid upfront “Shutdown proof” once awarded Full flexibility to spend across years The “Competitive ND” Tip If your grant is in the middle tier, tell your…

Trump signed the NIH’s budget into law on Feb. 3. Today marks the 30-day legal deadline for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to release the funding. Without this, the NIH cannot spend any of the newly appropriated research funding.  Last year, OMB revised a document called Circular A-11, nicknamed the Budget Bible, to…

Maryland is getting its first undersea internet cable, and it’s a monster. Amazon Web Services announced plans for “Fastnet,” a dedicated fiber optic system linking the state’s Eastern Shore to Ireland with enough raw power to stream 12.5 million HD films simultaneously. The project, set to be operational in 2028, represents AWS’s bet that customer…

Stoke, a rocket startup company, raised $510 million in Series D funding, the company announced last week. The new financing more than doubled the company’s total capital, which is now $990 million. Stoke plans to use the funds to “accelerate product development and expansion,” according to the press release.  In March, the company was selected…

Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for the creation of molecular structures with spaces large enough for gases and other chemicals to flow through. These structures are called metal-organic frameworks (MOF) and can be used to harvest water from the air, capture carbon dioxide,…

Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for immune system research that has contributed to medical advances in cancer and autoimmune treatments.  The researchers identified a class of cells called regulatory T cells and the genes that control them. Their work revealed how…

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) Director Kim Budil announced today that Michael R. Anastasio is the recipient of the 2025 John S. Foster Jr. Medal. Anastasio is the only person to have served as director of both Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos national laboratories The honor cites Anastasio’s four-decade role in U.S. stockpile stewardship, work…

Oak Ridge National Laboratory was named on 20 of the 2025 R&D 100 Awards, 17 as lead developer and three as co-developer.  The showing sets a new record for the lab, accounting for about one-fifth of all winners. Since the 1980s, ORNL has won more than 260 R&D 100 Awards Our sister publication engineering.com recently…

Kenvue shares tumbled more than 10% on Friday after a Wall Street Journal report revealed that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to link prenatal use of Tylenol, one of the company’s best-selling products, to autism in an upcoming federal report, a move that has rattled investors.  Kennedy is reportedly preparing…