NASA doesn’t just randomly decide what telescopes and satellites to shoot into space and what planet to study next. Instead, a committee of outside scientists drafts a set of goals and recommendations in what’s called a decadal survey. And though it notes some financial setbacks, a midterm review of the last decadal…
Noted craver of “the cleanest air” Donald Trump has finally nominated a science advisor. It’s the longest the post has remained vacant since its was created under law in 1976 (the post has been around since 1941).
Quantum computing has made it to the United States Congress. If this field of quantum information is the new space race, the US doesn’t want to fall behind.
Politicizing NASA is the final frontier. Or I guess I should say, it was.
An enormous laser targeted for shutdown by proposed federal budget cuts has just done some record-breaking science in order to understand the centers of faraway exoplanets that scientists call “super-Earths.”
As this year has dragged on, science fans have probably thought, dang, this federal government hates funding research and scientists. We also thought that. But despite the White House’s initial proposal, science agencies will be getting a somewhat surprising funding boost across the board for research.
It may not include everything on environmentalists’ wish lists, but a $1.3 trillion spending bill just released by Congress spares climate and energy research programs that President Donald Trump envisioned gutting.
House Science, Space and Technology Committee chairman and man who calls hearings to challenge basic climate science Lamar Smith struck an unusual tune in a hearing that garnered little attention earlier this week. Apparently, despite all evidence to the contrary, Smith is concerned about reducing carbon emissions and…
The National Science Foundation will require the institutions it funds to report findings of sexual or any other kind of harassment involving a principle investigator, according to a notice passed to Presidents of NSF Grantee organizations.
On the heels of revelations that he called President Donald Trump an “empty vessel” in 2016, EPA Chief Scott Pruitt is now thinking this whole global warming thing might not be so bad after all.
Foiled in his bid to slash the Department of Energy’s clean energy research programs in 2018, Trump is apparently going to try again: As reported by the Washington Post last week, a draft of the administration’s FY-2019 budget proposes cutting funding for the DOE’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE)…
Jess Phoenix is likely one of the only would-be U.S. politicians with a favorite volcanic eruption. (The 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum, if you were wondering.) She’s almost certainly the only one who’s led expeditions to active volcanoes around the world.
Canada is among the few countries in the world where genetically engineering human embryos isn’t just illegal, doing so could land you behind bars.
Earlier this month, when the biotech firm Human Longevity published a controversial paper claiming that it could predict what a person looks like based on only a teeny bit of DNA, it was just a little over a week before a second paper was published discrediting it as flawed and false. The lightening speed with which…
When Kevin Esvelt, an evolutionary biologist at MIT, started thinking about using genetically engineered mice to fight Lyme disease, among his first stops was a community meeting in the small Martha’s Vineyard town of Chilmark. Esvelt makes regular field trips to talk to the public about his work. If the potential of…
Last week, a draft of a Department of Energy study on electric grid reliability leaked. Though its final version could change, it essentially found that an increased reliance on renewable energy sources, including solar and wind, have not made the grid less stable. Instead, electric grids are “more reliable today”…
As public health officials are gearing up for another season of the mosquito-borne Zika virus, the Trump administration’s budget proposal is here with some very bad news: the administration wants to slash the Centers for Disease Control’s budget by 17%, including cuts to programs like the National Center on Birth…
The March for Science brought historic numbers of scientists to the streets to stand up for evidence-based reasoning, but whether it actually helped heal the partisan divide on issues like climate change is far less certain. A cursory look at the post-March media coverage suggests we’re as trapped as ever in our…
WASHINGTON, D.C.—On a day when tens of thousands of people crowded the National Mall in Washington, D.C. to march for science, a Congressman who can boast the only science PhD on Capitol Hill is something of a celebrity.
While the Trump Administration’s plan for massive cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency has caused a veritable national panic, much less discussed has been the proposal to slash the budget of the National Institutes of Health.
