Biden ’s lean science budget could mean tough choices for agencies
President Joe Biden today sent the U.S. Congress a $7.3 trillion spending blueprint that includes his priorities for research . But in an era of flat budgets, being on the White House’s priority list—which ranges from promoting the ethical use of artificial intelligence to finding a cure for cancer—may not mean getting more money. That’s the hard reality facing U.S. scientists as they pore over Biden’s budget request for the 2025 fiscal year, which begins on 1 October. With the slice of the U.S. budget that funds domestic research essentially capped under an earlier budget agreement with Republica...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 12, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news

Flirting female frogs blink to beckon potential princes
The female concave-eared torrent frog ( Odorrana tormota ) may not have eyelashes, but that doesn’t stop her from batting her lubricous lids at potential mates. These beady-eyed amphibians can be found on the banks of noisy streams throughout China, where the rapids would drown out ordinary croaks and chirps. So, males and females of this species have both evolved to produce and hear high-pitched mating calls that can be heard over the rushing din to signal that they’re seeking a suitor. But how does one jumping Juliet single out a ribbiting Romeo know to let him know she’s interested? In a study published ...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 11, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news

‘I’m never going to be Tony’: Jeanne Marrazzo, Anthony Fauci’s successor, vows a new direction at NIAID
When Jeanne Marrazzo started her residency at the Yale New Haven Hospital in 1988, the world was a very different place. Marrazzo provided care for dying AIDS patients—mainly gay men and intravenous drug users and their sexual partners. “Stigma was alive and well and thriving, and in fact, really, really ugly at the time,” Marrazzo told an audience of young scientists on 3 March in Denver, just before the start of an HIV/AIDS conference. “You really sometimes had to work hard to get your patients what you needed. That made me interested in political and scientific advocacy and activism very early on.” At th...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 8, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news

Online marketplace for animal samples could cut waste and save lives
Every year, millions of tissue and organ samples from animal experiments go to waste, left forgotten in the back of lab freezers or destroyed to free up space. Scientists in Spain are hoping a new online tool could help. Called aRukon and set to launch globally this year, the virtual marketplace will allow researchers to sell unused animal samples to other labs, potentially cutting waste and saving animal lives. Lluís Montoliu, a geneticist and vice director of the National Center for Biotechnology, is optimistic about the plan. A member of the committee for transparency in animal experimentation at the Confederatio...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 8, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news

U.K. science minister pays damages to researcher she accused of airing ‘extremist’ views
The United Kingdom’s science minister, Michelle Donelan, has agreed to pay damages in a libel complaint brought by an academic she had publicly accused of expressing support for terrorism. In a letter to the national funding agency UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) that she posted on X (formerly Twitter) in October 2023, Donelan said Heriot-Watt University gender studies professor Kate Sang and University College London social scientist Kamna Patel had posted tweets about the Israel-Hamas conflict that promoted “extremist ideologies.” The Conservative Party Cabinet minister said the two researc...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 6, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news

Stone tools in Ukraine were left by Europe ’s first known humans
Geologic ages ago in what is now Ukraine, a pack of human ancestors approached a crook in the Carpathian Mountains, which held hard but brittle glassy rocks—just right to break into tools with sharp edges. Bashing one rock against another, the humans shaped the stones into simple cutters and scrapers, as their own ancestors had done before them in Africa. More than 1 million years later, archaeologists uncovered their cache and dated cobbles found with the tools and other stone artifacts. In a paper out today in Nature , they conclude that early humans may have settled in Europe some 1.4 million year...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 6, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news

Science integrity sleuths welcome legal aid fund for whistleblowers
A Silicon Valley investor has pledged $1 million to help pay the legal costs of scientists being sued for flagging fraudulent research. Yun-Fang Juan, an engineer and data scientist by background, hopes the new Scientific Integrity Fund—the first of its kind—will make speaking up about wrongdoing less intimidating. The fund comes after a spate of cases in which high-profile scientists have retracted papers after whistleblowers made allegations of research fraud. “As scientists, we need to be able to ask questions and raise concerns about other researchers’ work, without the risk of being sued, or going bankru...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 5, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news

The Anthropocene is dead. Long live the Anthropocene
For now, we're still in the Holocene. Science has confirmed that a panel of two dozen geologists has voted down a proposal to end the Holocene—our current span of geologic time, which began 11,700 years ago at the end of the last ice age—and inaugurate a new epoch, the Anthropocene. Starting in the 1950s, it would have marked a time when humanity’s influence on the planet became overwhelming. The vote, first reported by The New York Times , is a stunning—though not unexpected—rebuke for the proposal, which has been working its way through a formal approval process for ...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 5, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news

Dengue is raging in Brazil. A promising local vaccine is at least a year away
When dengue started to circulate in his small town in the state of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, Fabio Vilella’s first thought was that he should get his 13-year-old son vaccinated. Children are especially vulnerable, and his son had dengue before, which increases the risk of severe disease. But Vilella, an environmental biologist, soon made a startling discovery: Not a single private clinic or pharmacy in the country had any vaccine left. “I’m really worried,” he says. Brazil is seeing an unprecedented surge in dengue, a viral disease that can cause excruciating pains and is sometimes fatal. An unusually hot ...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 5, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news

Final U.S. spending bills offer gloomy outlook for science
Scientists, prepare to tighten your belts. This week, the U.S. Congress is expected to approve six 2024 spending bills that call for sizable cuts or essentially flat budgets at a number of major federal research agencies. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is the biggest loser, with lawmakers imposing an 8.3% cut to $9.06 billion, some $820 million below 2023. NASA’s science programs will fall by 5.9% to $7.3 billion. Congress also reduced research-related spending at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The U...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 4, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news

Where did India ’s people come from? Massive genetic study reveals surprises
South Asia is home to one of the most diverse assemblages of people in the world. A mélange of different ethnic identities, languages, religions, castes, and customs makes up the 1.5 billion humans who live here. Now, scientists have revealed the most detailed look yet of how this population took shape. In the largest ever modern whole-genome analysis from South Asia—published as a preprint last month on bioRxiv, researchers reveal new details about the origin of India’s Iranian ancestry and when ancient hunter-gatherers settled the region . The study also turns up a surprise: an unexpectedly rich dive...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 4, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news

Puzzling skin side effects stymie advance of promising HIV vaccine
One of the most promising attempts to reinvigorate the stalled quest for an HIV vaccine has hit a snag that might seem minor but has major consequences: delaying the larger trials needed to show whether the concept works. In small safety and immune tests of the innovative vaccine strategy, which relies on a series of messenger RNA (mRNA) shots, an unusually high percentage of recipients developed rashes, welts, or other skin irritations. “We are taking this very seriously,” says Carl Dieffenbach, who heads the Division of AIDS at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which funded a recent pha...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 1, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news

Is the snake that just bit you deadly? Venom ‘pregnancy test’ could tell
Cecilie Knudsen placed the urine on one end of the strip, then sat anxiously for 15 minutes to see whether one or two lines appeared. She wasn’t testing for pregnancy. Instead, Knudsen, a biotechnologist and co-founder of VenomAid Diagnostics, was waiting to see whether the test she and her colleagues developed would accurately detect the presence of a particular snake venom in a sample of mouse urine. It did . The finding, published last month in Scientific Reports , represents “a really remarkable step in venom diagnosis,” says Kalana Maduwage, a physician and biochemist at the University ...
Source: ScienceNOW - February 29, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news

French scientists alarmed by ‘disastrous’ cut to research budget
Scientists in France are reeling after the government announced it will cut €904 million from this year’s budget for research and higher education. The cut, announced last week, is part of a broader €10 billion savings package that the government says is necessary to limit the nation’s public deficit in the face of dwindling economic growth since the budget law was adopted in December 2023. But scientists say the research sector is bearing a disproportionate share of the pain. The move comes hot on the heels of recent social crises in France, including farmers protesting rising costs and regulatory...
Source: ScienceNOW - February 28, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news

NSF board approves funding for just one of two proposed giant telescopes
U.S. astronomers will have to make do with one giant ground-based telescope rather than the desired two, the National Science Board (NSB) announced yesterday. Meeting last week, the panel of scientists that oversees the National Science Foundation (NSF) capped the budget of the U.S. Extremely Large Telescope Program (US-ELTP) at $1.6 billion, enough for a substantial share in one 30-meter class telescope. But US-ELTP represents the interests of two such projects—the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) in Chile and the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) in Hawaii—which are building components but not fully funded. The board ...
Source: ScienceNOW - February 28, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news