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Daily briefing: NIH foreign-grant cuts could leave thousands without care worldwide
Cuts to US ‘foreign subawards’ will abruptly end hundreds of clinical trials abroad. Plus, an mpox outbreak is overwhelming Sierra Leone’s health system and a rock with a painted dot that just might represent a nose.
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Writing with this pen could help people affected by Parkinson’s disease to be diagnosed at an early stage, which would help them to access treatment sooner. (Guorui Chen et al./Nature Chemical Engineering)
A 3D-printed pen filled with magnetic ink could help to spot the hallmark tremors of Parkinson’s disease. The pen’s movement on a surface generates a voltage in a metal coil, which is recorded as a current signal. In a small trial, researchers used machine learning models to compare signals generated by people with Parkinson’s with those produced by people without the disease. After some training, one model could identify people with Parkinson’s with an average accuracy of more than 96%.
A spike in bot traffic is putting pressure on the websites that host journal papers, databases and other online resources. BMJ’s chief technology officer, Ian Mulvany, reported in March that “bot traffic on our journal websites has now surpassed real user traffic”. Some site owners suspect these automated programs are gathering data to train artificial-intelligence tools. The sheer volume of bot requests could jeopardize smaller ventures without the resources to put in safeguards, says zoologist Michael Orr.
Sierra Leone now accounts for three-quarters of all new mpox cases in Africa, and its health system is overwhelmed. The outbreak is driven by the variant called clade IIb, but is showing features previously associated with a different strain, clade Ib — namely an explosive spread among both men and women, rather than primarily among men who have sex with men. This suggests that clade IIb could have become more transmissible, or that the two variants are more similar than was thought. In the meantime, Sierra Leone doesn’t have enough of the vaccine doses needed to get the outbreak under control.
In May, the US National Institutes of Health announced a policy that bans ‘foreign subawards’ — funds that a US grant recipient can give to an international collaborator. The move will abruptly freeze funding for dozens, if not hundreds, of ongoing trials of experimental drugs and treatments around the world. The policy endangers people who might suddenly find themselves without care, scientists say. And it is a waste of taxpayers’ money, says behavioural scientist Amy Conroy, one of nine affected researchers who spoke to Nature. “They will never know the results of this study that they’ve paid for,” she says.
President Donald Trump’s cuts to US research funding are taking a toll on researchers in Canada, where many work closely with US scientists on US-funded projects. “Every time I get on a Zoom call there is another person crying,” says landscape ecologist Jeff Cardille. “Every meeting feels like a funeral for our careers.” Cuts have also put at risk the data that underpin weather-forecasting and disaster-management systems. “The loss of that data will be very detrimental to not only researchers but everyday Canadians as well,” says biochemist Sarah Laframboise, who advocates for the role of science in policymaking.
A close examination of the red ochre dot on this stone, unearthed from the San Lázaro rock-shelter in Spain, revealed that the mark was made by a human finger. This raises the tantalizing prospect that a Neanderthal maybe, just maybe, meant the dot to represent a nose (the rock, say researchers, does indeed look like a face in person). “It could represent one of the earliest human facial symbolizations in Prehistory,” write the team that made the discovery. (BBC | 4 min read)
Fishing cemented writer Alex Brown’s passion for the wilderness. Joining a mission to stock a lake in a national park with hatchery-grown trout prompted him to reassess the relationship between fieldsports and conservation in the United States. (Longreads | 16 min read)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-01757-x
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