First House Minibus Passage
Policy
June 19, 2019 | House Committee on Appropriations
The House passed, on a 226 to 203 vote, a package of fiscal year 2020 appropriations bills. The package consists of four bills that fund federal departments including Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, Defense, State, and Energy from October 1, 2019 to September 30, 2020. Notable figures include $41.1 billion for NIH, $3.53 billion for DARPA, and $411 million for the BRAIN Initiative.
June 21, 2019 | American Institute of Physics
President Trump issued an executive order on June 14 that directs all federal agencies to eliminate 鈥渁t least one-third鈥 of the external advisory committees they have created under the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). The order excludes FACA committees that are mandated by statute or established by presidential directive. It also exempts panels that conduct merit reviews of applications for government funding or contracts, or that provide 鈥渟cientific expertise鈥 related to the 鈥渟afety or efficacy of products to be marketed to American consumers.鈥 Agencies have until Sept. 30 to comply.
June 21, 2019 | Science
New rules from the National Science Foundation (NSF) on reporting sexual harassment by someone with an NSF grant raise questions about due process, university administrators say. On June 20, 2019, a key congressional panel took those concerns to heart by modifying language in a bill that would require the administration to write guidelines applying to half a dozen major federal research agencies.
June 21, 2019 | Speaking of Research
Recent news about monkey sanctuaries, combined with a couple of legislative efforts narrowly targeted at animals in research at federal agencies, have stimulated media coverage and other discussions about the when, why, and how of research animal retirement.
June 18, 2019 | Nature
Hong Kong's government has suspended an unpopular bill that would legalize the extradition of people from the island to mainland China to stand trial or serve criminal sentences following huge street protests that began more than a week ago. But the protests have continued 鈥 and critics are still demanding the bill鈥檚 withdrawal.
June 17, 2019 | STAT News
Federally funded research labs conduct thousands of experiments that rely on monkeys and other nonhuman primates 鈥 and now, Congress is ramping up its scrutiny of that science. As part of the congressional appropriations process in the House this year, lawmakers directed both the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration to produce reports detailing the ways the agency鈥檚 scientists use the thousands of nonhuman primates in their research centers.
Science in the News
June 18, 2019 | Nature
Geneticist Rotem Sorek could see that his bacteria were sick. He had infected them with a virus to test whether each ailing microbe soldiered on alone or communicated with its allies to fight the attack. But when he and his team at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, looked into their flasks, they saw something completely unexpected: the bacteria were silent, and it was the viruses that were chattering away, passing notes to each other in a molecular language only they could understand.
June 18, 2019 | Duke-NUS Medical School
How dormant neural stem cells in fruit flies are activated and generate new neurons is described in a new research study by Duke-NUS Medical School. The findings could potentially help people with brain injury or neuronal loss, if similar mechanisms apply in humans.
June 17, 2019 | Science Daily
Researchers of the Hubrecht Institute (KNAW) and UMC Utrecht succeeded in growing mini-tumors (or organoids) of head and neck cancers, that can be kept alive in the petri-dish for a long time. Else Driehuis, researcher at the Hubrecht Institute: “These mini-tumors can be used to better understand this complex disease. Moreover, organoids allow us to test both novel and existing therapies in the lab, without burdening the patient.”
June 14, 2019 | Scientific American
Specific patterns of brain activity are thought to underlie specific processes or computations important for various mental faculties, such as memory. One such 鈥渂rain signal鈥 that has received a lot of attention recently is known as a 鈥渟harp wave ripple鈥濃攁 short, wave-shaped burst of high-frequency oscillations.
