GoKawiil
Tech News
The European Research Council received 7,710 Starting Grant proposals for 2027 funding by its October 14 deadline, up from 4,807 the previous year, while the number of available grants fell to 373 from 421 due to funding constraints. ERC president Maria Leptin said the surge is straining staff and reviewers, and the resulting success rate is expected to drop below 5%, down from 8.8% in the 2026 round.
China's National Natural Science Foundation has selected 44 researchers under 35 (38 for women), including 9 from outside the country, for its new National Distinguished Young Scientists Fund. NSFC president Dou Xiankang announced the picks at a Shenzhen forum, describing a 'five-plus-five-plus-five' structure where initial five-year grants can be renewed twice to reach 15 years, with funding doubling to 8 million yuan in the second phase. Dou said recipients would face no short-term performance assessments, only a requirement to remain active in the lab.
A Nature editorial argues that Europe and other regions need to formulate a coordinated response to changes in US science strategy. The piece does not detail specific US policy actions but frames the issue as an urgent strategic gap for global research funding and collaboration.
Federal agencies are screening roughly 200 terms—including equity, climate change and gender—to review grants for alignment with the Trump administration's research priorities. The administration cut about $3 billion in grants in 2025, with roughly $1.4 billion from the NIH and NSF still frozen or cancelled, while USAID's closure eliminated about $25 billion in international research and aid funding. Scientists have responded by seeking private donations, crowdfunding, shifting research focus, or pursuing interdisciplinary collaborations to keep projects alive.
A research team has developed a methodology to compare how countries fund and organize scientific research, drawing on data from 25 nations through a project called the China Fundamental Research Report. The approach goes beyond standard output metrics like publications and patents, aiming to capture harder-to-measure factors such as how funding structures affect researchers' careers over time.
The National Education Association's State Funding Update found state appropriations for higher education hit $129 billion in FY2025, up 4% year-over-year, but inflation-adjusted growth was only 2%. Seventeen states saw funding decline once inflation was factored in, and 12 states still haven't recovered to pre-pandemic inflation-adjusted funding levels. Many public universities also never fully restored per-student funding lost after the 2008 financial crisis.
Nature's 2026 job satisfaction survey of nearly 4,000 scientists across 133 countries found 61% at least moderately satisfied with their jobs, with about 75% optimistic or neutral about career prospects and 65% willing to recommend research careers to students. Salary ranked seventh of eight satisfaction factors, behind meaningful work, work-life balance, job security and research funding. The survey also found men more optimistic than women (56% versus 44%) and no significant satisfaction gap between industry and academic scientists, despite industry pay being 66% higher on average.
According to reports from The Washington Post, New York Times and Politico, the White House is drafting an executive order that would let OMB Director Russell Vought approve or reject every grant awarded by the NIH. The move follows a meeting in which NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya reportedly failed to stop the effort, marking the latest attempt by Vought to steer the agency's funding decisions after earlier attempts to cut its budget and impose political criteria on grants were blocked by Congress and the courts.
A university president outlines six principles meant to help institutions resist political pressure on research funding, peer review and academic autonomy, citing examples from the United States and Hungary. The piece traces how funding cuts, shifting grant priorities and legal campaigns against institutions like Central European University have already eroded independent scholarship in some countries.
A researcher at Slovenia's InnoRenew Centre of Excellence describes winning a nearly €2 million European Research Council grant to develop self-repairing, UV-protective fungal-biofilm coatings for buildings. The five-year award, secured after a lengthy application and resubmission process, immediately reshaped the scope of her research group's work and her own daily responsibilities, shifting her focus from hands-on experiments toward managing people and projects.
The US National Science Foundation will issue its fewest new grants in four decades after withholding roughly $1 billion for the White House's Grand Research Challenges initiative and pulling back recommendations for over 150 peer-reviewed proposals. Meanwhile, the National Natural Science Foundation of China is increasing its prestigious early-career grants by 50% this year, moving in the opposite direction as Washington retreats from research investment.
Responding to Ming Li's proposal to separate academic 'titles' from resource allocation in Chinese universities, a Nature correspondence argues the reform is unlikely to succeed. The author agrees that suppressed performance indicators tend to resurface under different labels, but contends university administrators benefit from the current metric-based system and thus have little incentive to change it.