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U.K. Needs to Take More Risks to Retain Startups, Business Secretary Says
The government has taken stakes in startups like Kraken, Wayve and Oxford Quantum Circuits in recent weeks, in a bid to prevent them from moving out of the country to look for funding.
World-leading UK science facilities at risk amid £162m funding crisis
Diamond Light Source and ISIS Neutron and Muon Source face cuts of up to 20% as Science and Technology Facilities Council seeks savings
County Supervisors Approve Three‑Year Integrated Plan, Funding Behavioral Health Care, Housing and Crisis Services
County Supervisors today approved the region’s first Behavioral Health Services Act (BHSA) Integrated Plan, a three-year roadmap for how the County will use funding to support mental health care, substance use treatment and housing for people with serious behavioral health needs.
Outgoing US National Academy of Sciences head warns of ‘turmoil’ ...
NAS president addresses research funding worries, the need to revamp the promotion and tenure system and how AI can help
Ulupono Initiative funding helps local food businesses bring Hawaiʻi-made products to retail shelves
A dozen Hawaiʻi-based food makers are getting a boost as they look to expand their locally sourced products to shelves in major retailers. A $25,000 grant from the Ulupono Fund at the Hawaiʻi Community Foundation is lowering barriers for these entrepreneurs to use the state’s first high pressure processing system.
Lawmakers continue to discuss potential Wyoming Business Council reforms
During the second meeting, the committee moved to revive the consensus block grant funding program. Plus, the Legislative Service Office (LSO) was directed to draft a bill based on agency recommendations for reforms and removal of underutilized WBC programs.
What voters need to know about BREC’s millage renewal
The millage funding BREC's maintenance and operation of parks, facilities and recreation services throughout East Baton Rouge Parish is heading to the ballot for renewal, with early voting set to begi… Already an INSIDER? Sign in. Already an INSIDER? Sign in
Shapiro Administration Highlights the Need for Funding to Grow Pennsylvania’s Innovation Economy, Visits AlphaLab Health in Pittsburgh - PA Department of Community & Economic Development
AlphaLab Health is a start-up accelerator collaboration created by Innovation Works and Allegheny Health Network to address healthcare problems experienced by clinicians and patients. Pennsylvania has always been a leader […]
Police Removed Prominent Scientists from the ADA Meeting. Researchers Respond
The organizers of the American Diabetes Association meeting had a group of researchers removed from the event for sharing an editorial about negative impacts of policy changes to research funding.
ICE funding bill is up for House vote after weeks of Republican delays
The legislation, which the Senate passed Friday, has been held up by disputes over President Donald Trump’s ballroom and the $1.8B payout fund.
SBIR Advance: $675,000 in state matching grants advance 7 innovative small businesses
MADISON – Seven small businesses in Wisconsin will receive up to $675,000 to commercialize their innovations, thanks to the SBIR Advance program’s latest round of funding. The state matching grant program provides assistance to companies in the process of completing a project...
'This is actually taking a page out of the Communist Party playbook': New White House proposal could deny scientists funding based on their political opinions
"It replaces expertise with political appointees, globally decouples the U.S. and completely guts our scientific ecosystem."
WATCH LIVE: House considers reconciliation bill funding Trump's immigration enforcement agenda
Holland & Knight Health Dose: June 9, 2026 | Insights
The U.S. Senate passed a reconciliation package on a 52-47 vote that will provide $70 billion in funding to support U.S. immigration enforcement agencies and their activities.
The Science Community Is Stepping Up. Let’s Go Bigger.
The scientific community is fighting a proposed change to research funding. Let's keep this momentum going to take on more attacks on science.
The role of peer review
Modern peer review safeguards scientific quality yet is increasingly shaped by incentives, political priorities and funding challenges.
We can create the future of science right now
Paul Litvak is the founder and Executive Director of the Robyn Dawes Institute and a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley. He has a PhD in Behavioral Decision Research from Carnegie Mellon where he studied emotions and the sunk cost bias. Over 15 years in industry, he solved a wide range of challenging technical problems. At Meta he created models optimizing the ad review process. At Google he ran experiments to measure social influence. At Airbnb, he was a product manager leading machine learning teams optimizing search ranking and price suggestions. He also co-founded and led product at Rhythmic Health, a venture-backed biosensing startup, creating an accurate low cost system using a color changing strip and a smart phone to measure salivary lactate. The bottleneck At this point, it is uncontroversial to say that science needs to stop using the PDF article as the unit of knowledge and currency. The unbearable slowness of scientific publishing, the profit motive and margins: I’m not saying anything new. The PDF also sucks because it’s hard to extract structured information, which makes it hard to do evidence synthesis. As a result, we do much less evidence synthesis than is needed. And evidence synthesis ultimately undergirds most policy and medical decision-making. I can see second-by-second real-time odds for any sporting or newsworthy event, but a school board can’t see the best evidence on whether their 8th graders should be taught algebra. As a society, we don’t treat this as an important problem. Again, not controversial. Not only is the problem well understood, but the solution has already been laid out. What we need is AI-assisted living evidence synthesis - (1) an open knowledge graph of atomic claims, (2) claims linked to evidence, (3) assessment and synthesis of each piece of evidence, and (4) continuous updating with new data. What few realize (yet) is that the technical capacity to build this vision for a significant portion of science already exists. Not only that, scientists and startup teams are already building many of these components. I know this because I’ve been surveying the space and talking to many of the builders. There are some missing pieces: for example, evaluations of how well some of the components work. But at this point, most of what’s missing is a fully end-to-end working integration of all of these parts. In the rest of this essay, I’m going to lay out all the parts of a working living evidence layer for science and who is working on them, and propose concrete next steps for building this system. What’s now possible The diagram above outlines the components of a living evidence synthesis platform, including some of the teams working on each component1. Scientific PDFs are processed into claims with associated evidence. The evidence is subjected to a forensic audit, methodological evaluation and robustness and reproducibility checks. Finally it’s given a weight in a continuously updating synthesis. What follows is a description and status of each component and a few of the teams working on them. Document understanding The first thing you need to be able to do is turn an article into structured data. Mostly that means parsing PDFs. There are often multicolumn layouts that confuse non-specialized PDF to text processing libraries. For scientific papers, there is the added complexity of parsing formulas and tables and figures. This is a really hot area - there are startups offering APIs, and it seems like a new open source package gets posted to Github every few weeks. What follows isn’t exhaustive. A package called GROBID was the state of the art for a while, they didn’t update their package for nearly two years until very recently. In the meantime reducto.ai released an AI powered PDF extraction API, PaddleOCR became popular, IBM released a model called Docling, and both Mistral and Gemini created models and libraries. I also know of at least one other well-funded psychology research group working on a paper parser. By contrast, there are few open evals in this space, with no extensive evals for complex table comprehension in particular. Nonetheless, I’m confident this will be a solved problem soon, given the combination of LLM advances and developer interest. Hypothesis level extraction There has been increasing interest in comprehending the extracted text of papers and linking information to evidence for each hypothesis. A lot of work has already been done. Trialstreamer (Marshall et al. 2020) and RobotReviewer LIVE (Marshall et al. 2023) demonstrated automated extraction of trial population, intervention, and outcome at scale on clinical RCTs. PaperQA2 (Skarlinski et al. 2024) and Ai2 ScholarQA (2024) extended this to retrieval-augmented question answering with citation grounding. Elicit, Consensus, and SciSpace operationalized claim-level extraction for end users. OpenEval (Booeshaghi et al. 2026) is the most recent and most ambitious: 1.96 million atomic claims extracted from 16,087 eLife manuscripts using Claude Sonnet 4.5, grouped into ~299,000 results, with LLM evaluations showing 81% agreement with human peer review on a 2,487-paper subset. None of these solutions link claims to test-statistics, as you would need to evaluate randomized controlled trials. This is why I built the evidence.guide API - to extract hypotheses and associated test statistics from behavioral science papers. The best public eval of this kind of extraction I’m aware of comes from the recent SCORE project - they had humans code thousands of psychology papers to extract their claims by hand. It would be extremely helpful to the world if all scientific PDFs were available as structured open data. I’ve been working to make this happen, both directly at Berkeley and through coordination with large entities I can’t yet speak of; as hard as it is to do, I think it’s possible2. Forensic audit A lot of work has been done on forensic audit, but some gaps remain. Of course, for biology papers that rely on images for evidence, there are a variety of tools (notably Proofig and ImageTwin) to spot anomalies. These are still well short of what sleuths like Elizabeth Bik can do on her own, but these tools are constant companions among fraud analysts. There’s someone working on auditing Excel files for anomalies, and a number of teams are automating numerical checks like GRIM and SPRITE, including Scrutiny project, the INSPECT-SR team as well as statcheck. The regcheck team is building a way to use AI to compare preregistrations to analyses in papers, to ensure there aren’t significant deviations. Nonetheless, there are many other kinds of anomalies to screen for, both public and less publicly known. And there are no formal evals for anomaly detection that I’m aware of. Still, there’s a lot to draw from in this space and I’m pretty certain we will be able to scan papers for most kinds of obvious anomalies in the near future. Methodological review This area has been white hot, though I fear for many of the startups in this space, because this capability may become commoditized. There are at least six different AI peer review companies, including Refine.ink, Reviewer3, ReviewerZero.ai, Q.E.D. Science, Paper Wizard, and Isitcredible. Coarse (a pun on refine) was also recently created as an open source alternative. These systems provide qualitative feedback on the content of papers, spotting methodological weaknesses and mathematical errors. They seem to work pretty well, and many academics report bitterly that they exceed the average quality of typical peer reviewers. But there are few evals here either. What evals exist so far involve using LLM-as-judge (circularity problems abound) or comparing against human reviews of questionable quality. What you’d ideally want is an eval that measures capturing known errors in papers3. Reproducibility and robustness Another active area has been using AI agents to automate computational reproducibility4 and robustness5 checks in papers that report numerical results. For more recent papers where data and code are available, AI agents can see whether they can re-run the analyses and produce the numbers reported in the published paper. In addition to a handful of individual academics who have been experimenting using Claude Code for this, the Institute for Replication is a leading group working on building an end to end system. The evals related to this problem are the most mature, with CORE-Bench (Siegel, Kapoor, Narayanan 2024) and PaperBench (OpenAI 2025) available to benchmark agents on this task. There is also work on getting AI agents to test alternative ways of analyzing the data to ensure the results are robust to small analytic design choices. Synthesis This is the most underdeveloped area where significant investment is required. Although some automated evidence synthesis systems exist — for example, otto-sr is building an AI agent to write systematic reviews — none of these incorporate the full range of paper level signals to weight evidence appropriately. Nor is there anything like an eval or a gold standard for a good systematic review. Arguably Cochrane reviews are the closest we have to gold standard human systematic reviews, though I’ve heard academics in the know complain about their uneven quality. A key question for a synthesis platform is how to weight anomalies and methodological issues in assessing the quality of a piece of evidence. This is an unsolved problem and one I’m very keen to work on. Continuous updating There are many pieces of basic infrastructure available for monitoring for new research and initiating updates. OpenAlex is the current open citation graph. Retraction Watch integrated into Crossref in October 2023. Scite tracks how citations support, contrast, or mention prior claims. The Living Evidence Network demonstrated continuous-update workflows in clinical guidelines. Engineering this is a relatively straightforward task. When you look over this technical architecture and all the progress being made, it’s hard not to be optimistic that a living guide to scientific evidence will be built. The stakeholders are ready The social infrastructure for this is starting to coalesce — it’s not just a pie in the sky academic exercise to imagine this coming into existence. Institutions like the Center for Open Science, the Institute for Replication, the INSPECT-SR, the Living Evidence Network and more are all working on scaling work to improve research quality. Funders are also aligned. The Sloan Foundation has funded living evidence work through COS. Coefficient Giving supports the Institute for Replication and COS. The Astera Institute and the Institute for Progress have shown interest in this space. NIH has established an Office for Replication and Reproducibility. Although there are (very unfortunately) serious headwinds in science funding generally, there is an active group of funders interested in metascience. A brief word about what I’ve been doing at RDI. First, as a Visiting Scholar at Berkeley I’ve been actively figuring out how a non-profit and a public university can conduct and make public the results of large-scale academic article data mining. With some of the money I raised from donors, I commissioned a legal analysis of recent case law and publisher text data mining (TDM) agreements in order to understand whether a massive open data mining of academic articles is possible (with caveats, it is). I’ve also been working to bring together stakeholders in this space, and identify gaps. I’ve also been doing some software development in this space, with more to come. A pilot proposal The assumption undergirding all of this is that an AI, given all this information, would make the right judgment about a scientific claim with lots of conflicting evidence, weighing all the factors appropriately. That’s the hypothesis we need to test. Randomized control trial research is the best place to focus on first. RCTs are used to make many of the important decisions in society - from medical trials to public policy changes. And they use a relatively uniform set of inferential statistics with lots of known and available diagnostics. Behavioral science experiments, within the broader realm of RCTs, should be first used as a testbed whose results can be generalized. Because behavioral science is at the vanguard of open science practices, replications abound (there are thousands of them) to serve as ground truth training data. Key Hypothesis Therefore the pilot would test, in behavioral RCTs that have been replicated, whether the quality of evidence for a claim can be used to accurately predict whether that claim will replicate. Secondary Hypotheses Compared to claims that replicated, non-replicated claims demonstrate a greater share of forensic anomalies in their source literatures. Hypothesis level claim and statistic extraction is accurate enough to scale living evidence without onerous human review costs. Replication prediction is more accurate than prediction markets6 or journal prestige. If all the different quality signals we gather do accurately predict which studies will replicate, then we can use that model to score evidence to power the living evidence layer. Why this is informative regardless of outcome If the pilot succeeds, the architecture extends to medical RCTs (where Living Evidence already operates and integration is mostly about claim representation), then to slices of basic biology with stable replication structure. If it fails, the field learns which quality signals are load-bearing and which ones metascience has oversold. Either result is a contribution to knowing what the literature supports. Implications for funders Because this burgeoning ecosystem of builders already exists, a well-informed philanthropic or government funder could play a crucial catalyzing role in bringing this future about. They could play at least three roles: creating open structured datasets, publishing open benchmarks and incentivizing the solving of key technical challenges. First, open archives of papers that the government maintains, like PubMed, could be turned into structured data amenable to large scale metascience and claim aggregation. I know the US government already has an interest in doing this, though some key open questions remain unanswered. How do you determine the best models and systems for accurately extracting information from papers? How can you establish a robust way to allow researchers to flag errors and correct them? And finally, how do you create a legal regime in working with publishers to maximize the scope of available papers? For the latter, a university or a private philanthropy may be better positioned to make structured data publicly available under journal subscription terms or fair use. Philanthropists or government funders could also coordinate to create or commission benchmarks that evaluate whether important problems have been solved. For example, an open benchmark for claim extraction from a range of different scientific article types would be extremely helpful. Ensuring the underlying data are accurate is vital for creating these evaluations. I’ve discussed opportunistically using various human-created datasets for this purpose, but a consistent problem is that errors in human data make it difficult for them to serve as a gold standard. Finally, with structured data and benchmarks available, the government or private philanthropy could use them to incentivize groups to develop machine learning systems that meet these benchmarks. Prizes are one potentially valuable tool for this. For example, you could establish a prize for a system that accurately updates a living meta-analysis for a small set of claims. Prizes are particularly useful as signals of problem importance, and can help create vibrant ecosystems of public and private research—see, for example the role the government played in kickstarting the current work on nuclear fusion. Conclusion The drawbacks of the current scientific publishing system are known. Scientists agree, metascientists agree, philanthropists agree: the published PDF plus citation graph isn’t the right substrate for maintaining a representation of the evidence base in science. The pieces needed to build the alternative either already exist or are rapidly taking shape. The community is forming around exactly this problem, with concrete partnerships and shared infrastructure. A pilot should start on behavioral science RCTs because that’s the slice of empirical science most amenable to legibility, where replication ground truth is richest, and where the failure modes are best documented. What’s been missing is the galvanizing mission to assemble these pieces into something that works. That’s what I’m proposing to build. *** 1 I have a broader field map that I’ll release publicly soon. This is me, building in public! 2 If this is something that you are excited about, please reach out and talk to me. 3 More on this very soon too! 4 This tests whether, given the code and the data, you can get the same statistics as reported in the published paper. 5 This tests whether the results are the same as a paper’s given alternative analytical decisions in conducting the analysis (like outlier omission). Closely related is the idea of a “multiverse” where you come up with many different ways of answering the same underlying research question with the same data, and test whether the results hold in all those alternative methods. There’s been work on the latter as well. 6 Some of the replications, e.g. those from the SCORE project, had paired the experiments with forecasts from prediction markets. So we get to look at this for free.
Europe pours money into ocean research as Trump guts science funding
US withdrawal means Europe is a lifeline for ocean research, although a poorer one.
Merton Redux: Re-Confronting the Norms of Science in Democracy
The decimation of democratic processes that undergird state-sponsored research may be ultimately more consequential than funding cuts.
Impulse Passes $1 Billion in Funding
Redondo Beach-based Impulse Space Inc. catapulted past $1 billion in total capital raised Tuesday with a new $500 million series D funding round, led by
Kin Health Raises $9 Million in Seed Funding
Armed with a recent $9 million seed funding raise, Westwood-based Kin Health Technologies Inc. is now trying to make good on its promise as a
Scientists lose critical climate record as ocean observatory will go dark under Trump funding cuts
A portion of one of the most ambitious ocean monitoring networks ever built will go dark this month when scientists board a research vessel and motor off the Oregon coast to pull a research buoy from deep out of the Pacific. The buoy 80 meters below the water's surface will…
$1.2 Million Keck Foundation Bridge Funding Initiative Makes Awards to Early‑Career Scientists at UC Davis
The University of California, Davis, is pleased to announce new awards totaling $1.2 million from the Bridge Funding Initiative supported by the W. M. Keck Foundation. This investment will provide critical resources to six high‑impact basic science projects during a period when early‑stage research often faces significant funding uncertainty.
Alaska health officials advance over 400 projects for Rural Health Transformation funding
The projects were selected from nearly 1,800 proposals that came from more than 800 organizations and companies.
Health workers at center of Congo's Ebola outbreak labor with little pay or rest
Health workers are handling the disease with minimal resources, because agencies have been scrambling to bring aid into the region.
UCDC program connects students to US politics at Capitol
UCLA students interning in Washington, D.C., this year navigated anti-immigration enforcement protests, congressional budget negotiations during appropriations season and uncertainty surrounding federal funding. The UC Washington Program, created in 1997, sends at least 31 UCLA undergraduate students to the United States Capitol each quarter.
WHO urges targeted action to strengthen emergency workforce capacities for shared health risks across the Asia-Pacific region
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 11 June 2026 – At a time when the world is more interconnected than ever, the World Health Organization (WHO) is disseminating a comprehensive regional analysis of shared health risks across Asia and the Pacific, urging Member States to invest in enhancing workforce capacities regionwide to mitigate these risks and ensure health systems are better prepared to anticipate, tackle and withstand a range of crises and shocks. Over 100 delegates from 49 countries and areas in the Asia-Pacific region reviewed results from the regional risk analysis during the WHO-led Asia Pacific Health Security Action Framework (APSHAF) Stakeholders Meeting in Malaysia. Synthesizing insights from 21 strategic risk assessments and more than 800 multisectoral experts, the regional analysis highlighted an urgent imperative: countries must proactively invest in emergency workforce preparedness to navigate a landscape where climate hazards, disease outbreaks and geophysical events increasingly overlap. These complex converging crises create devastating, compounding impacts on health systems and communities - reiterating the need for investing in a fit-for-purpose regional health workforce and multisectoral action. Key findings: an evolving risk landscape More than half of the participating countries ranked flooding, cyclones, dengue and pandemic-potential respiratory pathogens as being of high or very high risk, while antimicrobial resistance, landslides and gastroenteritis remain widespread concerns as well. “Given that 51% - over half - of these assessed hazards are deeply interconnected, isolated health interventions are no longer sufficient,” said Dr Saia Ma’u Piukala, WHO Regional Director for the Western Pacific. “Extreme weather events like cyclones and floods directly trigger subsequent disease outbreaks, while environmental degradation - driven by sea-level rise, coastal erosion and saltwater intrusion - fuels health risks across the Pacific. Mitigating these cascading risks requires unified, cross-sectoral action linking environmental, agricultural and public health policies to build true regional resilience.” Priority recommendations for action To address critical vulnerabilities, WHO calls on Member States in the Asia-Pacific region to urgently prioritize the following strategic actions: Bridge workforce capacity gaps. Embed and standardize emergency preparedness within academia to promote regional workforce interoperability. Foster multisectoral coordination. Address ad-hoc taskforce responses and fragmented surge support through formalized contingency plans and standard operating procedures that are frequently updated and tested. Secure sustainable financing for emergencies. Overcome systemic barriers to access dedicated funding for both immediate anticipatory actions and long-term emergency preparedness initiatives. Enable emergency-ready primary health care. Embed emergency management into public health workforce readiness planning. Ensure that emergency planning is inclusive. Establish clear pathways for inclusive emergency planning that actively involves communities most at risk and other vulnerable groups. Optimize communication. Update risk communication and community engagement strategies, aligning them with seasonal risk calendars. Elevating workforce readiness to meet regional health risks While the gaps identified are significant, the Asia-Pacific region possesses solid foundational pillars, including dedicated clinicians, laboratory staff, rapid response teams, emergency medical teams and extensive community networks. However, to adequately address the compounding nature of modern crises, the various components of the emergency workforce must collaborate cohesively. True resilience depends entirely on transforming this currently fragmented workforce into a highly trained, interconnected and rapidly deployable asset. To achieve this, WHO is actively advancing regional workforce capacities through the Global Health Emergency Corps initiative. This initiative - supported by the Gates Foundation and Institute of Philanthropy - seeks to build a seamless network of emergency workforce across borders and sectors, ensuring that when a crisis strikes, a standardized, well-coordinated and trained workforce is immediately ready to respond. “Scaling up emergency workforce readiness is no longer optional,” said Dr Gina Samaan, Regional Emergency Director for WHO in the Western Pacific. “It is the definitive factor that will determine how effectively the Asia-Pacific region safeguards health and protects lives in an increasingly unpredictable future.” For more information, or to arrange media interviews, contact: Ara Johannes, WHO Western Pacific Health Emergencies Division: johannesa@who.int WHO Western Pacific Communications: wprocom@who.int
A complicated funding tool helps a West Central business make public investments
A West Central business trying to build an oasis in the neighborhood’s food desert will receive nearly a quarter-million dollars in public funding through a decades-old mechanism that is only just recently starting to pay dividends.
The disease detectives suiting up for the World Cup
Public health officials are trying to fight Ebola with a Covid-era playbook but no pandemic-era funding.
Area healthcare workers rally at ‘Health Cuts Kill’ demonstration
Speakers spoke out against cuts to medicare and medicaid, as well as other federal funding reductions that, they say, will have devastating impacts.
Oakland First Fridays seeks sponsors as funding challenges force entertainment cuts
Oakland First Fridays faces funding challenges, forced to make entertainment cuts
Denver sports nonprofit expands one year after facing possible closure due to funding loss
Sports nonprofit expands one year after facing possible closure due to funding loss
Polis signs final bills from 2026 session, including several business-focused laws
The laws impact workers laboring outside, software sales, transportation funding, homeowners' insurance costs and law-firm ownership.
Readers Write: Immigration, fraud, science funding, ‘Nuclear Family Month,’ the GOP, Target
This is home. We’re staying put.
Surveillance, immigration and greyfields: CT politics news
Plus: Qualifying candidates, Hartford schools funding, Connecticut's AI legislation and a roundup of other bill signings.
Federal funding ends for fentanyl test strips as Ohio public health agency supplies run low
The Trump administration is now prohibiting the use of federal funds to purchase fentanyl test strips, one of the harm reduction tools available to combat the opioid epidemic. Columbus Public Health says once its current stock runs out, it will be difficult to purchase more.
Schumer rips Senate Republicans for passing billions in ICE and Border Patrol funding in late-night vote
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., slammed Senate Republicans for passing a measure providing billions in ICE and CBP funding.
AAMC-led HPNEC Holds Congressional Briefing in Support of Health Workforce Programs
The AAMC-led HPNEC held a June 3 congressional briefing on the importance of funding the HRSA Title VII and VIII programs.
Jersey health service cannot continue as it is
Patients say they feel "let down" by Jersey's health service as a GP says there are funding issues.
Senate Republicans pass immigration funding after overnight vote
After a marathon 18-hour vote, the Senate has funded immigration enforcement. The GOP bill funds ICE and the Border Patrol for three years.
Trump scores victory despite growing GOP divide after Senate passes $70B ICE, Border Patrol funding package
Senate Republicans advanced Trump's $70 billion immigration enforcement package after a marathon vote-a-rama marked by internal GOP divisions.
Melinda French Gates donates $215 million to improve women's health worldwide
The new funding pushes Melinda French Gates' donations for women's health over $600 million in the past two years.
Jefferson County Approves $300,000 for Small Business Development Programs
The Jefferson County Commission has approved economic development funding for two organizations aimed at supporting small business growth across the county.Comm
How Funding Cuts Left the World Vulnerable to Ebola
A strain with no known treatment or vaccine is spreading fast, and the international system built to contain outbreaks is in crisis.
Kaua‘i Ups Funding For Homeless Services, Mental Health, Substance Abuse
The funding is part of the county’s nearly $499 million spending plan for fiscal year 2027.
Melinda French Gates donates $215 million to improve women’s health worldwide
The new funding announced Thursday pushes French Gates’ donations for women’s health over $600 million in the past two years.
Scientists will lose critical climate record as ocean observatory goes dark under Trump funding cuts
The National Science Foundation announced it would dismantle most of the ocean monitoring system, pulling instruments from waters off Oregon, Washington, Alaska, North Carolina and Greenland by 2027.
Latest White House move to politicise science funding provokes ...
US research community mobilising to push back on proposed rule that would give apparatchiks control of which research gets funded
Rep. Al Green tells Homeland Security Sec. Mullin to 'shut up' after calling him a racist at hearing
Rep. Al Green called Homeland Security Sec. Markwayne Mullin a racist during a House committee meeting on funding and repeatedly told him to shut up.
Black men's health in Boston: New push to bridge life expectancy gap
City uses gathering to shape how $1 million in new funding will be distributed
Senate Republicans drop plans for $1bn to fund security at Trump’s ballroom
Fears that push for ballroom spending could jeopardize $70bn funding for immigration enforcement
Donald Trump’s proposed grant rules could destroy US science, researcher warns
Additional funding controls by Office of Management and Budget will make new discoveries less likely, say critics
WorkSource Fulton, Grady Health System partner for healthcare worker training investment
The funding is aimed at providing more skilled workers for industries in Fulton County, meeting the needs of businesses and residents alike.
Senate Republicans drop Trump ballroom funding from immigration bill
Senate Republicans have formally removed funding for President Donald Trump’s ballroom security as part of their sprawling immigration funding package, according to revised legislative text released Wednesday.
Scientists lose critical climate record as ocean observatory will go dark under Trump funding cuts
An expert said it’s a crippling loss of information.
Scientists lose critical climate monitoring in oceans along nation’s coastlines in wake of Trump funding cuts
In what a scientist called "a crippling loss of information," the Trump administration is dismantling a vital $386 million network of ocean sensors, including Oregon and Washington's coast.
The Trump Administration Has Launched Its Biggest Threat Yet to Scientific Research. We Can Stop Them.
Last week, the White House released draft regulations that—if enacted—will upend US science as we know it. Under the rule proposed by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), political appointees would have the final say over who gets billions of dollars of federal funding for res
Trump administration faces blame from health workers over Ebola outbreak after funding cuts
Elections to top science bodies test Croatia’s gender equality in research
Croatia’s track-record on gender equality in science has been both questioned and lauded in recent months, following both bad and good news on the topic. On the one hand, a senior awards committee was announced without a single woman researcher included. On the other, the national science academy welcomed its first cohort of fellows with more women than men.Members of the committee, which gives national awards recognising scientific achievement, are proposed by the ministry of science and endorsed by the parliament. The current line-up does include a woman, but she is culture minister Nina Obuljen Koržinek rather than a researcher. Even then, she didn’t make it into the photograph released to announce the appointments on April 16. “The image speaks a thousand words,” says Tanja Rudež, a science journalist for Jutarnji List newspaper. “I am surprised that none of these men, all well-known scientists, saw a problem with the fact that there was not a single successful female scientist on the committee,” she told Science|Business.Ivan Đikić, a prominent Croatian biochemist based at Goethe University Medical School, commented on LinkedIn that the news illustrated a “sad truth” about the state of science in Croatia.“It [. . .] reveals a system where women, despite contributing a substantial share of high-quality, internationally competitive science, are systematically excluded from the very processes that determine recognition and influence,” he wrote. Some 60% of researchers in Croatia are women, according to the Croatian Bureau of Statistics, and they perform well in international competitions. For example, of the 12 European Research Council (ERC) grants awarded to Croatian researchers, seven went to women.“So how is it possible that decision-making bodies are still dominated by men over 60, while not a single female ERC laureate is involved in the selection process?” asked Đikić. “This is not a marginal oversight; it is a structural failure.” The ministry of science did not reply to a request for comment. The awards committee is not unusual. For example, a scientific advisory body announced by the ministry of demographics in April comprises 35 men and five women. The board of the Croatian Science Foundation, newly appointed by the parliament, is a little better, with five men and two women, but still unequal. “This is especially significant because such bodies do not merely distribute prestige. They shape research priorities, funding allocation and long-term scientific development,” Marija Lugarić, chair of the parliament’s committee on gender equality, told Science|Business. “Representation here matters not only symbolically, but materially.”Referring to the awards committee and the board of the science foundation, Lugarić says that while both bodies were appointed by parliament, neither met the minimum 40% gender balance threshold that Croatian law and EU guidelines expressly recommend for public bodies.Đikić wants to see EU institutions put pressure on the government to ensure basic standards of fairness, transparency and democratic governance in science policy are met. “Meaningful change will not come without pressure,” he wrote. “It must intensify both within Croatia and at the level of European institutions. Anything less undermines the credibility of Europe’s commitment to excellence and inclusion in science.”Rudež also underlined the importance of talking and writing about this topic, “because public opinion in Croatia does influence changes in the status and visibility of women in science.”The European Commission has not yet responded to a request for comment.Good news from the academyA more positive story came from the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts on 21 May, with the announcement of seven new women fellows and five men. This is the first time in the academy’s 165-year history that women have outnumbered men in a new intake.One of the new fellows, two-time ERC grantee Iva Tolić, credits the academy leadership with trying to be more modern and inclusive, representing the whole community better. “The academy is really aware that so far, before this election, there were very few women,” she told Science|Business. “So, they are actively trying to make this more equal.”Related articlesExplained: How the MSCA is close to achieving gender balanceCall for EU to leverage academic freedom in global talent raceRudež is more cautious, noting that despite the academy’s “breakthrough this year [. . .] it is still a predominantly male institution, with only 18% women.”This reflects a wider imbalance in Croatia’s research landscape. “The key levers of power in science are still in the hands of men,” she went on. “For example, all 14 rectors of private and public universities are men.”Similarly, Lugarić says a structural glass ceiling still exists in Croatian science, which is “most visible precisely where power is exercised.”She cites data from the Commission’s She Figures 2024 report, which shows that Croatia ranks second in the EU for gender equality in research and innovation overall, with an equality index of 79.6 out of 100. It is in the top five for women’s career advancement, participation in research; representation across all research sectors and for scientific publications.In stark contrast, it ranks second to last when it comes to women in decision-making positions in science. “This is not a coincidence,” Lugarić says. “It is a structural pattern.”Informal barriersThe persistent under-representation of women in the highest structures of Croatia’s academies, boards, award committees and leadership positions is not down to formal barriers, Lugarić says, but arises from more subtle obstacles such as “informal networks, persistent expectations regarding traditional gender roles and the unequal distribution of care responsibilities.”Tolić would like to see more support for young women in terms of affordable housing and child support, and higher salaries. Currently, she says, salaries in science stay low for the first 10-15 years, while housing and spaces in kindergarten are limited and expensive. “You have to work a lot, you get very little money, so it’s not great to have a family in this situation,” she says.But despite the challenges, Tolić is optimistic, saying that gender equality in research in Croatia is “definitely improving and going in the right direction.” The situation is particularly promising in biology, she adds, where most full professors, heads of department and deans of faculties are women. Lugarić, too, see the glass ceiling “very slowly, cracking,” and cites the academy election as an example that structural change is possible. Yet the situation in the national awards committee is a “stark reminder that without a conscious, systemic commitment to gender balance, progress will remain slow and uneven.”
UTC REACH Fund supports community-driven health research across the Chattanooga region
The Research for Evidence-based Action in Community Health (REACH) Fund was established earlier this year through the Journey Health Foundation Research Center housed in the Gary W. Rollins College of Business at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. In less than one year, it’s already funding 10 interdisciplinary projects focused on improving community health across Southeast Tennessee.
President Trump seeks control of science funding
The White House Office of Management and Budget is moving to take more control of billions of dollars in federal grants. Critics say the proposed change would jeopardize the integrity of U.S. science.
President Trump seeks control of science funding
The White House Office of Management and Budget is moving to take more control of billions of dollars in federal grants. Critics say the proposed change would jeopardize the integrity of U.S. science.
President Trump seeks control of science funding
The White House Office of Management and Budget is moving to take more control of billions of dollars in federal grants. Critics say the proposed change would jeopardize the integrity of U.S. science.
An ex-lawyer has raised $70 million to take work away from law firms
Wordsmith, a startup building AI software for corporate legal teams, has raised $70 million in funding from Index Ventures and other backers.
President Trump seeks control of science funding
The White House and the Office of Management and Budget is moving to take more control of billions of dollars federal grants. This move has implications for areas as broad as housing and transportation, but science and health would be the most significantly impacted. Scientists and advocates say if it goes into effect, the change would jeopardize the integrity of science in the United States.
Factorial Raises $150 Million to Expand AI Agents in Business Software
Venture-capital firm General Catalyst led the funding round—that also attracted interest from Atomico and Four Rivers—as AI reshapes the business-management software market.
Nashville Downtown Improvement District Budget Fails by a Single Vote at Metro Council
The Metro Council rejects the annual budget for the Central Business Improvement District, raising concerns about funding for downtown services.
Scientists' ocean observatory off Oregon, Washington will go dark under Trump funding cuts
Funded by the foundation, the observatories have tracked everything from ocean circulation and marine ecosystems to climate change and extreme weather.
Morrisey announces $3.4M health funding opportunity
KINGWOOD – West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey spent Monday morning at Mon Health Preston Memorial Hospital in Kingwood speaking about community-based health. He was joined by local representatives, members of the Preston County Commission, state officials, local community partners and hospital officials. The purpose of his visit was to announce a $3.4 million statewide funding […]
Ocean sensors will go dark under Trump funding cuts
The Trump administration is dismantling a $386 million network of more than 900 ocean sensors funded by the National Science Foundation.
Scientists lose critical climate record as ocean observatory will go dark under Trump funding cuts
The Trump administration is dismantling a $386 million network of more than 900 ocean sensors funded by the National Science Foundation.
Scientists lose critical climate record as ocean observatory will go dark under Trump funding cuts
How California Politics Became So Blah
The only truly passionate players in today’s election appear to be the corporate moguls funding the anti–Tom Steyer campaigns.
How Science Works
The 2nd Weather and Climate Livestream is now underway. It is organized by a group of early-career researchers concerned about declining funding for the field and eager to demonstrate how weather and climate research makes a difference in our lives. Last year’s event was a great success, drawing terrific press coverage including a piece in the NY Times. This year features a strong lineup of talks aimed at a general audience — I highly recommend tuning in. Share I gave a talk yesterday about How Science Works in Three Steps. You can see the short presentation here (I’ve appended a transcript below): And please tune into the livestream here. It runs through tomorrow at 6 pm ET. Thanks for reading The Climate Brink! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work. Subscribe Cleaned up transcript: Thank you, and thanks to everyone tuning in. I want to talk about something I think a lot of people don’t really understand: how science actually works. Arguments over any scientific topic — climate change, vaccines, you name it — revolve around competing claims. For climate change, the claims are: Is the Earth warming? Are humans to blame? What will the impacts be? Over the last 150 years, the scientific community has developed a remarkably robust method for sorting out which claims are true and which aren’t. That method is what I want to walk through. So how does science generate knowledge? If you ask a high schooler, they’ll give you the version they learned in ninth grade: an individual scientist forms a hypothesis, runs an experiment, and draws a conclusion. That’s more or less what happens at the individual level, though in practice it’s more iterative — you design, test, and refine all at once, landing on a slightly different idea each time until you reach a conclusion about whatever hypothesis you’ve ended up with. But this isn’t science. It’s only step one. Any individual scientist can make mistakes — scientists are human. Maybe there’s a bug in the code, maybe there’s an error in the experiment. Just because someone ran an experiment and reached a conclusion doesn’t mean it’s right, and scientists don’t treat a single result as settled truth. Step two is peer review, the first layer of quality control. The scientist writes up what they did and submits it to a journal, which sends the paper to other experts in the field. Those experts judge whether the methods are sound, whether it properly references prior work, and whether the conclusions actually follow from the data. Ask any scientist and they’ll tell you peer review is miserable — the comments come back brutal, often harsh, and you have to revise and resubmit, sometimes multiple times, before an editor finally accepts the paper. Peer review catches an immense amount of bad science, but it can’t catch all of it. Reviewers get sloppy or overworked, they miss obvious mistakes, and they can’t catch hidden errors — a bug in the code, a misread instrument. So a peer-reviewed paper making it into a journal doesn’t mean the paper is right. Nobody treats a single paper as the final word. That’s where step three comes in: the crucible of science. Important results get retested by the broader community. If you publish something interesting, it gets dissected. Sometimes people try to reproduce your work directly but more often they test its implications. If someone claims X is true, and that implies that Y is also true, then scientists will go check Y. If a claim survives this gauntlet long enough, it becomes accepted. That’s how we generate knowledge. Let me give an example: the ozone hole. In 1985 — and I doubt many people watching were around then, but I remember it well — Joe Farman and his colleagues published observations from Antarctica showing that a huge chunk of ozone was disappearing every year. This was shocking because most atmospheric chemists had expected ozone loss to occur at mid-latitudes and high altitudes, not over the South Pole. When scientists see something they don’t understand, they rush to explain it, and several competing hypotheses quickly appeared in the peer-reviewed literature. One pointed to chlorine chemistry from chlorofluorocarbons. A second blamed nitrogen chemistry, possibly driven by solar proton events — meaning the sun was responsible. A third argued it wasn’t chemistry at all but dynamics: winds were carrying naturally low-ozone air from the lower atmosphere up into the stratosphere. Then the community went to work testing which theory could survive the crucible. Aircraft flew into the ozone hole and found no nitrogen, ruling out the nitrogen theory. Measurements showed the air in the polar vortex was descending, not rising — which would bring high-ozone air down, eliminating the dynamics theory. Meanwhile, those same flights measured enormous amounts of chlorine, strongly correlated with exactly the regions where ozone was being destroyed. That became known as the “smoking gun” paper, and it established that chlorine chemistry was the cause. Through this process, a consensus emerged. And it’s worth being clear that this consensus is organic. There’s no vote, no poll, no meeting where it gets decided. Scientists go to conferences, talk to one another, and independently arrived at the same answer. It’s the ultimate free market of ideas. After the consensus was established, the peer-reviewed literature doesn’t even mention the rival theories — it simply takes chlorine chemistry as given. That’s what a consensus looks like. It doesn’t mean every single scientist agrees, but it does mean there’s no longer any legitimate debate. So where can you see what scientists actually think? It’s all in the peer-reviewed literature, which contains the entire historical record of the argument: the discovery, the competing theories, the debate, the testing, and finally the community coalescing around one answer. But there’s a lot of room for misrepresentation. You can dig up an old paper claiming the ozone hole was caused by dynamics and wave it around as if there still was a debate about the cause of the ozone hole — without mentioning that the idea was disproven long ago and that even its own authors no longer believe it. There’s a bigger problem, though: the peer-reviewed literature is written in a language I call “nerd.” It’s extremely hard to read — honestly, some of it is hard for me to follow. It takes graduate students years to work through the literature in a single field, so we can’t expect policymakers or ordinary people to do it. This is where scientific assessments come in. The most famous is the IPCC — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The job of an assessment is to read and summarize the peer-reviewed literature, synthesizing what’s settled, what’s been disproven, and what remains genuinely debated. To ensure the assessments accurately summarize the peer-reviewed literature, assessments are written by large teams, which are far less prone to bias than individuals and which dilute the influence of any one scientist with an axe to grind. The teams are deliberately assembled to avoid stacking the deck, and the reports themselves go through multiple rounds of peer review. That rigorous process is exactly why you can trust them and why people consider the IPCC to be the gold standard of what we know about the climate system. An assessment produced through a different process may well not be credible. You can even watch the consensus evolve across assessments. Take the attribution of warming. The 1990 IPCC report said the observed warming was broadly consistent with model predictions but also comparable to natural variability — in other words, we don’t know whether humans are responsible. By 1995, it concluded that the balance of evidence suggested a discernible human influence — a sentence only a committee could write, and one that barely commits to anything. By 2001, most of the warming over the previous 50 years was judged “likely” due to greenhouse gases; by 2007, “very likely”; by 2013, “extremely likely.” The 2023 report says essentially the same as 2013 — there’s not much stronger language available. So, to wrap up: science is our ultimate tool for deciphering the universe — the most successful method we’ve ever developed for determining what’s true and what isn’t. Our understanding is written into the peer-reviewed literature, so if you want to know what scientists think, that’s where to look. And for those of us who don’t speak nerd, scientific assessments are the Rosetta Stone — they translate nerd into English. Let me open the floor to questions. Thank you.
Wharton Seminars for Business Journalists To Hold Flagship October 2026 Program in Philadelphia
Applications now open with all-expenses-paid fellowships available, deadline to apply is September 2 What: The Wharton School is pleased to invite business journalists to apply for the Wharton Seminars for Business Journalists flagship program, held on Wharton’s Philadelphia campus. There are several funding opportunities available for journalists, including an all-expenses-paid…Read More
‘A rude awakening’: more doctors running for office in rebuke to Trump’s health policies
Medical professionals are entering the political arena as funding cuts, layoffs and RFK Jr’s vaccine skepticism spur them to action
How one state’s medical meal program lowered health care costs
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Filament Sciences Secures $2M Seed Funding
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AI-powered auction app Tilt raises $26 million: pitch deck
Take a look at the pitch deck that helped Tilt land its latest funding round.
Scientists produce more novel but less disruptive work as they age
Analysis poses tough questions on who should receive more funding - younger researchers or older ones?
Towards a responsive health system and equitable access to quality RMNCAH services
Indonesia’s vast geography and sociocultural diversity shape the delivery of reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health (RMNCAH) services in ways that are both enabling and challenging. Across provinces, significant variation has been observed in how services are planned, resourced, and delivered. These variations in service standards and quality are felt daily in the lives of women, newborns and adolescents. Despite these challenges, progress is visible. National estimates show a drop in maternal mortality ratio, from 331 to 140 per 100 000 live births since 2000, signaling improvements in care quality and access. Fertility has stabilised and contraceptive use has grown, yet unmet reproductive health needs persist, and adolescent pregnancies continue to reflect early marriage and limited access to youth-friendly services.To better understand how Indonesia’s health system has evolved under decentralisation, the Ministry of Health, supported by World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), IPAS and the Asian Development Bank (ADB), conducted a joint external review of RMNCAH programmes. This review draws on multiple sources of evidence, including existing literature, policy documents, national health system data, as well as field visits to six selected provinces to represent Indonesia’s geographic and administrative diversity. During the field visits, review teams observed service delivery in health facilities, spoke with health workers and local leaders and met mothers and families to understand how RMNCAH policies are operationalised. One of the challenges identified was the management of low birthweight (LBW) infants, a major contributor to neonatal deaths, under resource constraints. One midwife described a severe case of extremely LBW twins, one stillborn and the other died after three days of care. She recalled how the surviving infant struggled to swallow and may not have received breast milk, while simultaneous emergencies required the team’s attention, affecting the care provided to the infant.A subsequent review of the case by the district health office revealed insufficient antenatal care, fragmented maternal medical history due to population mobility, referral delays, limited provider capacity in neonatal intravenous access and a heavy workload that constrained proper newborn monitoring. These insights informed recommendations to strengthen both system-wide and service-level responses. Since the early 2000s, Indonesia’s decentralisation initiative has given much of the responsibility for funding, staffing and managing health services to regional governments. While the Ministry of Health sets national clinical standards, daily management of public health facilities falls under regional authorities through the Ministry of Internal Affairs. While this arrangement allows services to be tailored to local needs, it also depends heavily on local capacity for planning, budgeting and management. Health facilities and district health offices are better positioned to translate national priorities into local action when they have access to consistent technical support, helping health workers manage resource constraints and infrastructure gaps.The complexity of Indonesia’s health system governance is no easy feat to navigate. Understanding these dynamics is essential to strengthening policy, improving coordination and ensuring more equitable access to services across Indonesia. Under the leadership of Ministry of Health, recommendations from this exercise will be key in guiding the nation’s roadmap to an equitable and quality health system for RMNCAH.Written by Edit Oktavia Manuama, National Professional Officer (Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health), and Jessie Yunus, National Professional Officer (Gender, Rights, Equity, and Disability Inclusion)
Rep. Davis appeals for federal funds to reopen bankrupt rural hospital
Rep. Davis is urging President Donald Trump to provide tens of millions of dollars in federal funding to reopen Martin General Hospital.
The Next Step in Trump’s War on Science - Center for Progressive Reform
A proposed new rule would replace merit-based funding of science with a heavily politicized process. It would also deprive scientists of the ability to rely on finding for long-term projects. This proposal has no real legal basis. It is likely to undermine American science, giving a boost to China's efforts to take over global scientific leadership.
The Next Step in Trump's War on Science
OMB's new rule attempts to politicize funding for scientific research. It goes far beyond OMB's legal authority.
"The live-action Smurfs movie paid for itself entirely through product placement" - Former Dragon Age boss suggests games can be funded another way
Ex-BioWare veteran Mark Darrah has suggested publishers and studios could look to movies for new game-funding ideas.
PacWave makes the most of funding delays by sparking curiosity in scientists, students
Scientists and teachers are using funding delays for Oregon State University's PacWave project to spark a sense of curiosity among students and discovery among researchers.
OC Officials Won’t Pursue Renewing Funding For New Black Infant Health Program
OC Health Care officials decided not to pursue a grant for a program aimed at supporting Black moms and their kids.
CDC says containing the spread of Ebola is top priority
The Trump administration disregards infectious disease playbook, CEPI offers vaccine funding, and other health news from Morning Rounds
Northwestern Researchers Pitch Ideas with Environmental and Health Impact
At an event led by Professor Jennifer Dunn, interdisciplinary teams competed for $200,000 in seed funding, and a group headed by Professor Giorgia Chinazzo will receive $71,000.
Governor Morrisey Announces $3.4M Rural Local Health Challenge Funding Opportunity
Governor Patrick Morrisey announced a $3.4 million for a statewide local health challenge funding opportunity to advance prevention-focused, community-based health initiatives through West Virginia’s continued participation in the federal Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP).
Westerman touts transportation funding, defense economy, outdoors act - Talk Business & Politics
U.S. Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Hot Springs, said he will host a field hearing in Hot Springs during the second week in June to collect testimony for the Great American Outdoors...
Top U.S. science funder slows research grants to universities
It's not clear why the National Science Foundation may be limiting funding to certain U.S. universities
WCADAMHS approves funding for local mental health and addiction services agencies for FY 27
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Sheriff, mental health experts sound alarm over loss of funding for mobile crisis teams in state budget
Mental health care experts gather to express concerns for behavioral health funding in Newsom's proposed budget.