My Hobby and Interest - Research

 Nature News How to respond to hate speech without fuelling it further Psychologist Mirta Galesic discusses an increase in hateful comments online, and the science-backed way to react. By   Dhruv Shenai Is society losing the fight against hate speech?  Hate speech — discourse that attacks a person or group on the basis of their inherent characteristics or identity — is on the rise worldwide. It can be triggered by various events, from elections and migrant crises to this year’s men’s football World Cup. Posts that were hostile to people of South Asian origin in the United States  rose by 240%  on the social-media platform X between January 2024 and June this year. Hateful discourse can widen social divisions, instill ‘us versus them’ narratives and increase political polarization. Divisive rhetoric is also being exacerbated by content generated by artificial-intelligence models and bot accounts. Scientists are keen to understand these phenomena so that they can ...

 Science News A new map points out U.S. rivers most worth protecting The detailed assessment suggests what would have the biggest conservation bang for the buck By  Stefan Lovgren First, the bad news: Of all the rivers in the contiguous United States, only 6 percent are both in healthy condition and meaningfully safeguarded. The good news is that many more may be just one repair away from thriving. A new map highlights where conservation money and attention  would do the most good  as the climate warms, researchers report September 16 in  PLOS One . The effort is the most comprehensive to date, assessing the health of the lower 48 states’ rivers and streams. “We can now point at a map for the first time and say, these are the rivers most capable of sustaining diversity of aquatic life, and this is what each one needs,” says Mary Khoury, a freshwater ecologist at The Nature Conservancy who is based in Chicago. For decades, conservation in the United States has be...

A Weekly Update of Policy News and Select Funding Opportunities Compiled by Van Scoyoc Associates View this email in your browser October 2, 2026 Health Lame-duck effort brewing to protect NIH grantmaking Senate appropriators from both parties are workshopping language that could be added to a spending bill to prevent the White House from exerting political influence on medical research grants. The provision would go into the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill that lawmakers hope to pass before stopgap funding expires Dec. 11. The senators, led by Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine, and ranking member Patty Murray, D-Wash., say that guardrails are needed around National Institutes of Health grantmaking in the wake of actions by the Trump administration to wield influence over medical research. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, chair of the Interior-Environment Appropriations Subcommittee, said she is working on similar language for that subcommittee’s bill, which would sh...

October and November The  Freeport Fall Festival  in Freeport, Cumberland County, runs October 2 to 4, overlapping the closing days of Cumberland Fair. Freeport and Cumberland Fair are both in Cumberland County, the second and last same-county overlap in the whole dataset. The  Fryeburg Fair  in Fryeburg, Oxford County, runs October 4 to 11, eight days, the longest run of any event in this dataset, and overlaps Freeport's closing day. The  Damariscotta Pumpkinfest & Regatta  in Damariscotta, Lincoln County, runs October 9 to 12 and overlaps the closing days of Fryeburg Fair. November holds one event alone: the  Maine Harvest Festival  in Bangor, Penobscot County, runs November 21 and 22, more than five weeks after the previous event on this list closes.

Join me in the Scarborough main conference room on this week or on zoom: Tuesday Sept 29 and Sept 31, 8:00am-8:30am https://maine.zoom.us/j/4625543963 If you are joining in person in the main conf room in Scarborough, mats are available in the lobby closet. Come early to make yourself a space for practice.

 Science Magazine NIH details $170 million biomedical research reproducibility effort Agency director announces literature search tool, other plans to improve reliability of science findings by Jocelyn Kaiser The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has unveiled a new tool meant to help biomedical researchers search the scientific literature and learn whether a finding has been replicated by other groups. It’s among several efforts that NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya  discusses today in an editorial online  in  Science  to further one of his top priorities: bolstering reproducibility in biomedical research. The agency is also moving ahead with a reproducibility initiative that began as an ambitious draft proposal to replicate high-profile published findings. Bhattacharya’s boss, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., had suggested during one of his Senate confirmation  hearings  that one-fifth of NIH’s $47.2 billion budget could be...

 

 NY Times White House backtracks on plan to exert new control over NIH grants The White House has backed away from a plan to issue an executive order that would subject billions of dollars in federal health and biomedical research spending to heightened political scrutiny, according to four people familiar with the situation. The proposed directive would have established a commission with the power to block government research grants if the money supported work in areas that did not align with President Trump’s political agenda. The plan was discussed in a White House meeting on Friday, and some on Capitol Hill had expected Mr. Trump to issue the order as soon as this week. But fierce opposition from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress forced the White House to recalibrate this week, according to some of the people familiar with the discussions, who described private conversations on the condition of anonymity. Nevertheless, they said, officials do not appear to have totally...