My Hobby and Interest - Research

  Washington Week in Science - November 6, 2026 A Weekly Update of Policy News and Select Funding Opportunities Compiled by  Van Scoyoc Associates View this email in your browser November 6, 2026 Health   Pharma critic Bernie Sanders is set to hold major sway over FDA funding bill  Democrats’ landslide victory in the midterm elections may have significant implications for the upcoming negotiations over a key funding source for the Food and Drug Administration, in part by empowering a major critic of the program. The FDA collects user fees from pharmaceutical companies to fund the agency’s reviews of their medicines. The Prescription User Fee Drug Act must be renewed before the current law expires on Sept. 30. Otherwise, it could disrupt the FDA’s ability to approve medicines. The power to shape that legislation will fall to senior Democrats, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who will likely lead the Senate’s health committee. Sanders is one of the few lawmakers ...

Retraction Watch  Scientific Reports on hold in PubMed while NLM reevaluates journal The National Library of Medicine has stopped indexing articles from  Scientific Reports  in MEDLINE because the journal’s inclusion in the world’s largest biomedical library is under review, Retraction Watch has learned.  “Following its significant growth in recent years,  Scientific Reports  is currently being reviewed by the US National Library of Medicine (NLM),” the journal’s chief editor Rafal Marszalek wrote in an Oct. 20 email we have seen. “We have been informed that during this period, indexing of newly published content in MEDLINE and archiving in PubMed Central (PMC) are paused, and will not appear in PubMed.” Marszalek did not say why NLM is reviewing  Scientific Reports,  which is the largest journal in PubMed in terms of articles indexed. But according to  MEDLINE’s policies page , NLM re-evaluates journals if “there are significant changes to a...

  Record number of female governors elected With some governor’s races still unresolved, at least 17 women will serve as state chief executives next year. By Alexandra Marquez | NBC News   With some governor’s races still unresolved, at least 10 Democratic women were projected to win their contests, and three  Republican  women — Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte and Tennessee Gov.-elect Marsha Blackburn — were projected to do the same. Democratic women made historic gains in battleground states for their party, with former public health official Amy Acton in Ohio and state Rep. Gina Hinojosa in Texas emerging victorious in races that were not initially expected to be competitive. In her victory speech, Hinojosa told her supporters: “I am a daughter of the Rio Grande Valley, where the people embody the work ethic and values of our great state, where no one would have imagined that one day, a little girl from the RGV would stand bef...

  Data Science Workshop - Introduction to Workflows and Nextflow Pipelines - register by Nov 16 The Data Science Core is offering a free workshop at the MDI Biological Lab. Please see attached for details and spread the word at your INBRE institutions. Workshop: Introduction to Workflows and Nextflow Pipelines  The course covers the basic principles of computational workflows, introduces Nextflow’s DSL2 workflow language, and gives participants hands-on experience launching their own pipelines to analyze real data. November 16th, 2026  10 AM - 3 PM  Schedule: Morning session:  Lecture, Computation Workflow introductions, nextflow resources, real-world examples of data we have processed using nextflow. Lunch  Afternoon session:  Hands On RNAseq example, pipeline configuration and execution, debugging, downstream analysis. Hang out after the course for networking and open office hours (in person only) Register here:  Registration Link   Questio...

  What the Election Maps Don’t Show The View from Maine by Dr. Dora Anne Mills November 4, 2026 What the Election Maps Don’t Show Two things are true today. The first is that a blue tidal wave, a “Bluenami,” as some are calling it, swept the country last night. Swings this large tell us something about a restless, unsettled country. The second is quieter, and you have to look at a map to see it. Maine’s map looks much as it has for a decade. The rural rim - The County (Aroostook - the northernmost), western mountains, Down East, the vast interior - voted heavily Republican, while the more urban and southern parts of the state voted heavily Democratic. Similar rural-urban patterns can be seen in other states. I believe these wild swings and regional sorting stem in part from a similar root: more and more of us live, work, and scroll among people who nod in agreement, and rarely cross paths with anyone who doesn’t. The political scientist Robert Putnam has spent a career on this. In ...