Oct. 8 (UPI) — Parents are struggling to manage their children’s heavy use of screens, including television, computers, phones and gaming devices, according to a Pew Research survey.
When asked how they are managing the use of screen time, 42% say they could do a better job with 58% believing they are doing the best they can, according to the survey released Wednesday.
Thirty-nine percent said they believe they are stricter about their children’s screen time than other parents they know.
Parents have more priority over other daily routines. Pew found 42% make sure screen time is reasonable with 76% believing enough sleep is a priority, 77% good manners, 61% staying active and 54% reading.
The survey was conducted May 13-26 among 3,054 eligible parents sampled from the American Trends Panel, Pew Research Center’s nationally representative panel of randomly selected U.S. adults.
Separately, four online focus groups were also conducted from March 4 to 6 with a total of 20 U.S. parents or guardians of at least one child 1 to 12.
“I think eventually we will give it to them, but now … she’s not ready,” one parent said. “We spend too much time on phones. … How can we expect a 9-year-old to control and have a balance between their screen time?”
“I also have three other children in the house, and I work full time,” another parent said. “To just keep some of my sanity, the first thing I do is turn the TV on. … Being the wintertime, it’s hard for them to go outside. … I want to work on the screen time for the summertime.”
A vast majority of children 12 or younger have access to devices — 90% for TV, 68% for tablets, 61% for smartphones, 50% for gaming devices, 39% for desktops or laptops, 37% for voice-activated assistants, 11% for smartwatches and 8% for AI chatbots.
In the survey, 82% said they allow a child younger than 2 to watch TV.
Involving smartphones, 76% of parents say their 11- or 12-year-old uses one, 64% of those 8-10, 58% 5-7 and actually higher 59% ages 2 to 4. Thirty-eight percent of their child younger than 2 ever use or interact\ with one.
A total of 23% say their child has their own smartphone. Broken down, it’s 57% those 11-12, 29% for 8-10, 12% for 5-7 and 8% younger than 5.
Among specific content, 85% of parents said their child ever Watches YouTube, including 51% daily. In 2020, it was 80% for children 11 and younger.
And 15% said their children 12 and younger use TikTok, 8% Snapchat, 5% each Facebook and Instagram. They are using these platforms even though companies have put age restrictions in place.
Eighty percent say social media harms outweigh the benefits, though 46% say a smartphone is more harmful and 20% for tablets.
Parents surveyed explained why they let their children use cellphones: 92% to contact them, 85% for entertainment, 69% to help in learning, 43% to calm them down and 30% so they don’t feel left out.
Pew found there are only slight differences in views for Republican and Democratic parents.
PORTLAND, Maine — Australian scientists tested the strength of bite-resistant wetsuits by allowing sharks to chomp the materials at sea and found that the suits can help keep swimmers safe.
Fatal shark bites are vanishingly rare, with less than 50 unprovoked shark bites on humans worldwide in 2024, according to the International Shark Attack File at the Florida Museum of Natural History. But increased sightings of large sharks in some parts of the world have swimmers, surfers and divers looking for new ways to stay safe.
Scientists with Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia, tested four bite-resistant materials and found they all reduced the amount of damage from shark bites. They performed the work by dragging samples of the materials behind boats and allowing white and tiger sharks to bite the samples.
The bites from such large sharks can still cause internal and crushing injuries, but the materials showed effectiveness beyond a standard neoprene wetsuit, the scientists said. The research found that the bite-resistant materials “can reduce injuries sustained from shark encounters,” said Flinders professor Charlie Huveneers, a member of the Southern Shark Ecology Group at Flinders and a study co-author.
“Bite-resistant material do not prevent shark bites, but can reduce injuries from shark bites and can be worn by surfers and divers,” Huveneers said.
There were small differences between the four tested materials, but they all “reduced the amount of substantial and critical damage, which would typically be associated with severe hemorrhaging and tissue or limb loss,” said Tom Clarke, a researcher with the science and engineering college at Flinders and a study co-author.
Chainmail suits to resist shark bites have existed for decades, but lack in flexibility for aquatic activities like surfing and diving, the scientists said in research published in the journal Wildlife Research on Thursday. Newer wetsuits can be designed to provide flexibility as well as protection.
The scientists tested the efficacy of wetsuit materials Aqua Armour, Shark Stop, ActionTX-S and Brewster. The scientists said in their paper that they found that all of the materials “offer an improved level of protection that can reduce severe wounds and blood loss, and should be considered as part of the toolbox and measures available to reduce shark-bite risk and resulting injuries.”
The promise of effective shark resistant wetsuits is encouraging for people who spend a lot of time in areas where there are large sharks, said Nick Whitney, a senior scientist and chair of the Fisheries Science and Emerging Technologies Program at the New England Aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life in Boston. That includes surfers and spearfishers, he said.
Whitney, who was not involved in the study, said it’s also encouraging that the materials are unlikely to make a person “feel invincible” and engage in risky behaviors around sharks.
“I also like it because it’s not relying on any impact on the shark’s behavior,” Whitney said. “It’s basically very, very simple. In the extremely rare event that you get bitten by a shark, this material will hopefully make you bleed less than you would if you were not wearing this.”
The researchers said the suits do not eliminate all risks from sharks, and precautions still need to be taken around the animals.
They are hopeful their research will help the public “make appropriate decisions about the suitability of using these products,” Huveneers said.
President Trump blamed the over-the-counter drug acetaminophen, commonly known by the brand name Tylenol, as a significant factor in the rise of U.S. autism diagnoses on Monday, at a news conference in which he offered often inaccurate medical advice for the nation’s children and pregnant women.
“Taking Tylenol is not good. I’ll say it. It’s not good,” Trump said, flanked by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz.
In a series of rambling, error-filled remarks that touched upon pain relievers, pregnancy, vaccines and the Amish — who he inaccurately said have no autism prevalence in their communities — Trump also said that the mumps, measles and rubella vaccine should be broken up into multiple shots and that children defer until age 12 the hepatitis B vaccine series now started at birth.
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“I’m just making these statements from me, I’m not making them from these doctors,” he said. “It’s too much liquid. Too many different things are going into that baby.”
The announcement was met with dismay from autism researchers and advocates who said that research thus far into causal links between acetaminophen and autism has turned up minimal evidence.
“Researchers have been studying the possible connections between acetaminophen and autism for more than a decade,” said Dr. David Mandell, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. The Trump administration, he said, “has cherry-picked findings that are not in line with most of the research.”
Physicians and researchers also took issue with Trump’s insistence that there was “no downside” to women avoiding fever-reducing drugs in pregnancy. In fact, studies show that untreated fever in pregnancy is associated with higher risk of heart and facial birth defects, miscarriage and neurodevelopmental disorders — including autism.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration will initiate a safety-label update for Tylenol and other acetaminophen products and send a letter to physicians about potential links between the drug’s use and autism, Kennedy said.
The actual text of the letter is much milder than Trump’s impassioned critique.
“In the spirit of patient safety and prudent medicine, clinicians should consider minimizing the use of acetaminophen during pregnancy for routine low-grade fevers. This consideration should also be balanced with the fact that acetaminophen is the safest over-the-counter alternative in pregnancy among all analgesics and antipyretics,” states the letter, signed by FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary.
Monday’s announcement followed weeks of speculation that Kennedy planned to publicly link Tylenol usage to autism, which prompted multiple medical associations to release statements clarifying that any evidence of a causal relationship between the two is limited, and that the drug is safe to take during pregnancy with medical advice.
“All of us in the advocacy community, and all of us who have children with autism, had very high hopes that RFK and the President were serious when they said they wanted to find the causes of autism,” said Alison Singer, co-founder and president of the Autism Science Foundation. “The problem is that so far, what we’ve heard has not been gold-standard science.”
The administration also said it would fast-track the labeling of leucovorin, a generic drug currently used to reduce side effects of chemotherapy, as a treatment for autism-related speech deficits. Also known as folinic acid, leucovorin is a form of the B vitamin folate. Research into its effect on autistic children is still in its early stages, researchers said. The few studies that have been published had small sample sizes and found only minimal improvements in symptoms of concern, Mandell said.
“I want to see a large, rigorous, independent trial. In the absence of that, to tout this as a cure is reckless,” he said. “Families deserve better.”
Autism spectrum disorder is a complex neurological and developmental condition. Symptoms cluster around difficulties in communication, social interaction and sensory processing, and the condition can manifest in many different ways based on co-occurring disabilities and other factors.
Diagnoses in the U.S. have risen steadily since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began tracking data in 2000, thanks in large part to a broadening definition of the disorder and increased efforts to identify children with ASD.
Today one in 31 U.S. 8-year-olds has been identified as having autism spectrum disorder, according to the most recent CDC data, up from one in 150 in 2000.
Kennedy has long asserted that’s due to an external environmental cause, often using inaccurate statements to describe both the condition and the research around it.
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Most experts believe genetic links and changing diagnostic criteria play a significant role in the trend. In April, Kennedy dismissed such research and arguments as “epidemic denial.” He said he was certain an external factor was to blame.
“We know it’s an environmental exposure. It has to be,” Kennedy said. “Genes do not cause epidemics.” He said at the time that the administration would find an environmental cause by September.
Research into causal links between acetaminophen and autism have not found strong evidence.
Last year, a team of researchers from the U.S. and Europe reviewed records of 2.5 million babies born in Sweden between 1995 and 2019. At first glance, it did seem like children exposed to acetaminophen in the womb were 5% to 7% more likely to be diagnosed with autism than those who weren’t. But when the researchers compared those children to their siblings, they found that kids from the same parents were equally likely to be diagnosed with autism, whether their mother took acetaminophen during pregnancy or not.
“If you actually do an apples to apples comparison, you see absolutely zero effect. The association flatlines. In other words, there’s no real risk that’s attributable to acetaminophen,” said Brian K. Lee, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at Drexel University who was on the study team. “A large elephant in the room is being ignored, and that’s genetics.” Hundreds of studies over the years have explored the complex genetics of autism, with both inherited and spontaneous genes contributing to the condition.
The paper also noted that women who took acetaminophen while pregnant were, unsurprisingly, more likely to suffer from the kinds of ailments for which the medication is indicated, like fevers or chronic pain.
They were also more likely to have diagnoses of autism or other neurodevelopmental disorders, to have pre-existing mental health conditions or to be taking other prescribed medications, the team found. Their results were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“People don’t take acetaminophen for fun. They are taking it for a health condition,” Lee said.
He compared the correlation between Tylenol exposure and autism to the correlation between ice cream sales and drownings. Both of those things tend to increase at the same time each year, he said, not because ice cream is deadly but because both rise during hot summer months. In other words, the underlying health causes that women are taking acetaminophen to treat could be more likely linked to autism than the pain reliever itself.
“This is just such a shame when there are so many things we could do to help autistic children and adults, and the negative consequences — making parents feel guilty about taking Tylenol during pregnancy and newly pregnant women afraid — are real,” said Catherine Lord, a clinical psychologist and autism researcher at UCLA. “Just sad all around.”
A federal judge Thursday said she was “inclined to extend” an earlier ruling and order the Trump administration to restore an additional $500 million in UCLA medical research grants that were frozen in response to the university’s alleged campus antisemitism violations.
Although she did not issue a formal ruling late Thursday, U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin indicated she is leaning toward reversing — for now — the vast majority of funding freezes that University of California leaders say have endangered the future of the 10-campus, multi-hospital system.
Lin, a judge in the Northern District of California, said she was prepared to add UCLA’s National Institutes of Health grant recipients to an ongoing class-action lawsuit that has already led to the reversal of tens of millions of dollars in grants from the National Science Foundation, Environmental Protection Agency, National Endowment for the Humanities and other federal agencies to UC campuses.
The judge’s reasoning: The UCLA grants were suspended by form letters that were unspecific to the research, a likely violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, which regulates executive branch rulemaking.
Though Lin said she had a “lot of homework to do” on the matter, she indicated that reversing the grant cuts was “likely where I will land” and she would issue an order “shortly.”
Lin said the Trump administration had undertaken a “fundamental sin” in its “un-reasoned mass terminations” of the grants using “letters that don’t go through the required factors that the agency is supposed to consider.”
The possible preliminary injunction would be in place as the case proceeds through the courts. But in saying she leaned toward broadening the case, Lin suggested she believed there would be irreparable harm if the suspensions were not immediately reversed.
The suit was filed in June by UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley professors fighting a separate, earlier round of Trump administration grant clawbacks. The University of California is not a party in the case.
A U.S. Department of Justice lawyer, Jason Altabet, said Thursday that instead of a federal district court lawsuit filed by professors, the proper venue would be the U.S. Court of Federal Claims filed by UC. Altabet based his arguments on a recent Supreme Court ruling that upheld the government’s suspension of $783 million in NIH grants — to universities and research centers throughout the country — in part because the issue, the high court said, was not properly within the jurisdiction of a lower federal court.
Altabet said the administration was “fully embracing the principles in the Supreme Court’s recent opinions.”
The hundreds of NIH grants on hold at UCLA look into Parkinson’s disease treatment, cancer recovery, cell regeneration in nerves and other areas that campus leaders argue are pivotal for improving the health of Americans.
The Trump administration has proposed a roughly $1.2-billion fine and demanded campus changes over admission of international students and protest rules. Federal officials have also called for UCLA to release detailed admission data, ban gender-affirming healthcare for minors and give the government deep access to UCLA internal campus data, among other demands, in exchange for restoring $584 million in funding to the university.
In addition to allegations that the university has not seriously dealt with complaints of antisemitism on campus, the government also said it slashed UCLA funding in response to its findings that the campus illegally considers race in admissions and “discriminates against and endangers women” by recognizing the identities of transgender people.
UCLA has said it has made changes to improve campus climate for Jewish communities and does not use race in admissions. Its chancellor, Julio Frenk, has said that defunding medical research “does nothing” to address discrimination allegations. The university displays websites and policies that recognize different gender identities and maintains services for LGBTQ+ communities.
UC leaders said they will not pay the $1.2-billion fine and are negotiating with the Trump administration over its other demands. They have told The Times that many settlement proposals cross the university’s red lines.
“Recent federal cuts to research funding threaten lifesaving biomedical research, hobble U.S. economic competitiveness and jeopardize the health of Americans who depend on cutting-edge medical science and innovation,” a UC spokesperson said in a statement Thursday. “While the University of California is not a party to this suit, the UC system is engaged in numerous legal and advocacy efforts to restore funding to vital research programs across the humanities, social sciences and STEM fields.”
A ruling Lin issued in the case last month resulted in $81 million in NSF grants restored to UCLA. If the UCLA NIH grants are reinstated, it would leave about $3 million from the July suspensions — all Department of Energy grants — still frozen at UCLA.
Lin also said she leaned toward adding Transportation and Defense department grants to the case, which run in the millions of dollars but are small compared with UC’s NIH grants.
The hearing was closely watched by researchers at the Westwood campus, who have cut back on lab hours, reduced operations and considered layoffs as the crisis at UCLA moves toward the two-month mark.
In interviews, they said they were hopeful grants would be reinstated but remain concerned over the instability of their work under the recent federal actions.
Lydia Daboussi, a UCLA assistant professor of neurobiology whose $1-million grant researching nerve injury is suspended, observed the hearing online.
Aftewards, Daboussi said she was “cautiously optimistic” about her grant being reinstated.
“I would really like this to be the relief that my lab needs to get our research back online,” said Daboussi, who is employed at the David Geffen School of Medicine. “If the preliminary injunction is granted, that is a wonderful step in the right direction.”
Grant funding, she said, “was how we bought the antibodies we needed for experiments, how we purchased our reagents and our consumable supplies.” The lab consists of nine other people, including two PhD students and one senior scientist.
So far, none of Daboussi’s lab members have departed. But, she said, if “this goes on for too much longer, at some point, people’s hours will have to be reduced.”
“I do find myself having to pay more attention to volatilities outside of our lab space,” she said. “I’ve now become acquainted with our legal system in ways that I didn’t know would be necessary for my job.”
Elle Rathbun, a sixth-year neuroscience PhD candidate at UCLA, lost a roughly $160,000 NIH grant that funded her study of stroke recovery treatment.
“If there is a chance that these suspensions are lifted, that is phenomenal news,” said Rathbun, who presented at UCLA’s “Science Fair for Suspended Research” this month.
“Lifting these suspensions would then allow us to continue these really critical projects that have already been determined to be important for American health and the future of American health,” she said.
Rathbun’s research is focused on a potential treatment that would be injected into the brain to help rebuild it after a stroke. Since the suspension of her grant, Rathbun, who works out of a lab at UCLA’s neurology department, has been seeking other funding sources.
“Applying to grants takes a lot of time,” she said. “So that really slowed down my progress in my project.”
Two of the company’s clients are teaming up in a blockbuster buy-in.
Thanks to an earth-shaking event in the chip industry it serves so faithfully, semiconductor equipment specialist Lam Research(LRCX 3.59%) experienced a pleasant share price rise on Thursday. Bullish investors bid the company’s stock up by almost 4% in price, effortlessly beating the 0.5% gain of the S&P 500(^GSPC 0.48%) that trading session.
A memorable day for chip companies and their suppliers
Lam Research didn’t have any news of its own to report, but we sure can’t say that about two of its chipmaking customers, Nvidia and Intel.
Image source: Getty Images.
That morning, Nvidia announced it is ponying up $5 billion to invest in a meaningful chunk of Intel’s common stock. It’s doing so, in its words, so the two high-profile tech companies can “jointly develop multiple generations of custom data center and PC products that accelerate applications and workloads across hyperscale, enterprise, and consumer markets.”
This is hardly the first big-money investment finding its way into Intel recently. No less an entity than the U.S. government announced near the end of August that it’s taking a stake worth just under $10 billion in the company, and this was preceded shortly beforehand by a similar, $2 billion move made by SoftBank.
Increased business for equipment makers
With that amount of capital gushing into Intel, the tech hardware company is sure to significantly ramp up its manufacturing efforts. This, of course, means more business for specialty manufacturing equipment companies like Lam Research. At this point, it’s hard to make meaningful estimates on this effect on the company’s fundamentals, but there’s little doubt it’ll be positive.
The bullish investor reaction to the news, then, was entirely understandable and rather justifiable.
Eric Volkman has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Intel, Lam Research, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: short November 2025 $21 puts on Intel. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Consumer staples makers are generally considered resilient businesses, but even Dividend Kings fall out of favor sometimes.
The Motley Fool just updated its report on the 10 largest consumer staple companies. You probably know every name on the list, which includes retail giants like Walmart(NYSE: WMT), product makers like Procter & Gamble(NYSE: PG), and tobacco companies like Philip Morris International(NYSE: PM). Also on that list is a Dividend King food and beverage company that has a historically high yield. Here’s why it could be the best opportunity for investors today.
What does PepsiCo do?
To get right to the crux of the topic, PepsiCo(PEP 1.12%) is the company in question. It sits at No. 7 on the list of the largest consumer staple companies, with a market cap of around $200 billion. It is one of three beverage makers on the list, the other two being Coca-Cola(KO 0.94%) at No. 4 and Anheuser-Busch InBev(NYSE: BUD) at No. 10.
Image source: Getty Images.
Unlike those other two, however, PepsiCo’s business extends well beyond beverages. It also has leading positions in the salty snack (Frito-Lay) and packaged food (Quaker Oats) segments of the sector. It is one of the most diversified companies on the top-10 list. Only Unilever(NYSE: UL), which makes household products and food, has a similar degree of diversification.
PepsiCo, meanwhile, stands toe to toe with every company on the list with regard to name recognition. For more direct peers, those that manage brands and are not retailers, it can compete equally on distribution, marketing, and product development. And, like all the other names on the list, PepsiCo is large enough to act as an industry consolidator, buying smaller companies to round out its brand portfolio and keep up with consumers’ buying habits.
The proof of the business’s strength and resilience is best highlighted by the fact that PepsiCo is a Dividend King. It has increased its dividend annually for 53 consecutive years, which is not something a company can achieve if it doesn’t have a strong business model that gets executed well in both good times and bad. For reference, other Dividend Kings on the list include Walmart, Coca-Cola, and Procter & Gamble.
Among the sub-grouping of large consumer staples companies that are also Dividend Kings, PepsiCo has been the laggard in recent years. To put a number on that, PepsiCo’s 2.1% organic sales growth in the second quarter was less than half the 5% growth of Coca-Cola, its closest peer. No wonder PepsiCo’s stock is down more than 20% from its 2023 highs, the worst result from the Dividend Kings grouping. That also puts PepsiCo into its own personal bear market.
However, the market’s negative view of PepsiCo could be an opportunity for long-term dividend investors. For starters, history suggests that PepsiCo will muddle through this rough patch, as it has done many times before. Second, the company is already making moves to improve performance, including buying a Mexican-American food maker and a probiotic beverage company. Third, falling share price has pushed its dividend yield up to 3.8%, which is toward the high end of the stock’s historical yield range.
That last point suggests that PepsiCo stock is cheap right now. This view is backed up by the fact that the company’s price-to-sales and price-to-book-value ratios are both well below their five-year averages. The company’s price-to-earnings ratio is sitting around the longer-term average. This is an opportunity if you think in decades and not days.
The time to jump is now
The interesting thing here is that PepsiCo is actually the best-performing stock on the top 10 list over the past three months. It seems investors are beginning to recognize the potential. But given how far the stock has fallen, it is still flying under the radar a bit. If you like owning Dividend Kings with reliable businesses, PepsiCo can still be an attractive long-term investment to add to your portfolio… if you act quickly.
Reuben Gregg Brewer has positions in PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, and Unilever. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Walmart. The Motley Fool recommends Philip Morris International and Unilever. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Republican and Democratic voters share common ground when it comes to the University of California: Both sides express widespread support for UC, its research, medical centers and ability to elevate the lives of students, a statewide poll shows.
Strong majorities of registered voters across demographic groups — urban and rural, racial, education levels — said UC research was good for their communities, including 62% of Californians with only high school diplomas. Voters in their 20s have the most favorable view of research.
The survey results, from the nonpartisan UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, come as the university system faces major battles with the Trump administration over deep research funding cuts and President Trump’s demand of a $1-billion fine to resolve federal charges of antisemitism at UCLA.
“In an era where the benefits of public higher education are being questioned, the polling results suggest that California’s residents see the value in a UC education and recognize the many different ways the UC system contributes positively to the state,” said G. Cristina Mora, the institute’s co-director .
For months, the University of California has been enveloped in the nationwide drive by Trump to reshape higher education, which he sees as a bastion of liberalism hostile to conservative thinking. The 10-campus UC system has faced hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to federal research support that the Trump administration derided as wasteful spending. Last month federal officials suspended more than half a billion dollars in medical study grants to UCLA. Negotiations with the federal government to restore the grants are ongoing.
The Berkeley poll of 6,474 registered California voters showed a more nuanced political picture between Democrats and Republicans against the backdrop of White House invective that accuses selective universities of being hotbeds of race- and gender-based discrimination rooted in diversity, equity and inclusion movements that Trump says don’t match the will of the American people.
UCLA, UC Berkeley and UC Irvine have been accused by the Trump administration of illegally using race in admissions. The entire UC system is also under federal investigation for allegations that it has discriminated against Jewish employees and practiced sex- and race-based hiring discrimination.
Berkeley pollsters found strongest support for UC from Democrats, people with college degrees and state residents who are not white.
But majorities of Republicans also showed support for UC across the board:
58% of Republicans agreed or strongly agreed that UC “produces important research that benefits communities in California,” compared with 78% of Democrats.
75% of Republicans agreed or strongly agreed that UC academic health centers, such as UCLA Health, are “important to the communities they serve,” while 80% of Democrats said the same.
54% of Republicans agreed or strongly agreed that the UC system is “important for helping students to get ahead.” Among Democrats, 74% gave the same responses.
Mora said it was “surprising” that Californians appeared to know enough about UC research to support it.
“Usually, you may think of the UC system as one about teaching and giving degrees. But there was strong approval of research and medical centers.”
The university has six academic health centers and, in Los Angeles County alone, more than a dozen UCLA Health locations. Mora, a UC Berkeley sociology professor, said she thought people’s personal experiences with UC doctors in local communities may have contributed to positive views of UC health programs throughout the state.
IGS co-director Eric Schickler said the data were starkly different from national surveys on higher education.
“If you look at national polling, the story is pretty clear: Republican confidence in higher education has gone down a lot and there’s even some erosion among Democrats in terms of confidence or approval,” said Schickler, a UC Berkeley political science professor. “What you are seeing in California is very strong support in despite those trends.”
One prompt that showed a large gulf between the parties was on taxpayer funding for UC.
Asked whether California should give more or less money to the system, 74% of Democrats said UC should get more. Only 30% of Republicans agreed. UC gets about 9% of its budget from the state, a percentage that has declined over the years amid state budget crunches and payment deferrals.
The institute did not ask Californians about Trump or his education agenda. Instead, the questions were framed in apolitical terms focused on how respondents valued different parts of the UC experience.
Schickler said the Institute of Governmental Studies, while contained within a UC campus, does not take sides in the current political conflict over colleges and universities.
“Our philosophy has always been that the IGS poll is a nonpartisan poll,” he said. “The sample and survey has the same process as any survey we do. This is not a survey UC asked us to do.”
The poll also asked whether Californians would tell a close friend who was admitted to a UC school to enroll or not. In total, 70% of respondents said they would advise enrolling. However, there was a political split: 82% of Democrats said they would share such advice, compared with 51% of Republicans.
Researchers conducted most of the polling in early June, months into cutbacks to U.S. campus grants from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and other federal agencies as the government curtailed research into racially diverse groups as well as LGBTQ+ populations, among other areas.
The surveying largely took place before the Trump administration’s conflict with UC came to a head this month, when the White House demanded $1 billion and sweeping campus changes to restore more than $500 million in research grants at UCLA.
Pollsters asked an additional question in mid-August to a separate set of 4,950 voters who were UC degree recipients. That survey took place after Trump’s latest cuts to UCLA.
It asked UC degree holders whether, “considering the costs of getting your degree from a UC school versus the benefits to you personally, in your opinion was getting your degree worth it or not?”
In response, 82% of Democrats said a UC degree was worth the money, compared with 64% of Republicans.
WASHINGTON — A divided Supreme Court said Thursday the Trump administration may cancel hundreds of health research grants that involve diversity, equity and inclusion or gender identity.
The justices granted an emergency appeal from President Trump’s lawyers and set aside a Boston’s judge order that blocked the canceling of $783 million in research grants.
The justices split 5-4. Chief Justice John G. Roberts joined the court’s three liberals in dissent and said the district judge had not overstepped his authority.
The court’s conservative majority has repeatedly sided with the administration and against federal judges in disputes over spending and staffing at federal agencies.
In the latest case, the majority agreed that Trump and his appointees may decide on how to spend health research funds allocated by Congress.
Upon taking office in January, Trump issued an executive order “ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferencing.”
A few weeks later, the acting director of the National Institutes of Health said the agency would no longer fund “low-value and off-mission research programs, including but not limited to studies based on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and gender identity.”
More than 1,700 grants were canceled.
Trump’s lawyers told the court NIH had terminated grants to study “Buddhism and HIV stigma in Thailand”; “intersectional, multilevel and multidimensional structural racism for English- and Spanish-speaking populations”; and “anti-racist healing in nature to protect telomeres of transitional age BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and People of Color] for health equity.”
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and his counterparts from 15 Democratic-led states had sued to halt what they called an “unprecedented disruption to ongoing research.” They were joined by groups of researchers and public health advocates.
The state attorneys said their public universities were using grant money for “projects investigating heart disease, HIV/AIDS, Alzheimer’s disease, alcohol and substance abuse, mental-health issues, and countless other health conditions.”
They said NIH had terminated a grant for a University of California study examining how inflammation, insulin resistance, and physical activity affect Alzheimer’s disease in Black women, a group with higher rates and a more aggressive profile of the disease.
Also terminated they said was a University of Hawaiʻi study that aimed to identify genetic and biological risk factors for colorectal cancer among Native Hawaiians, a population with increased incidence and mortality rates of that disease.
In June, the Democratic state attorneys won a ruling from U.S. District Judge William G. Young, a Reagan appointee. He said the sudden halt to research grants violated a federal procedural law because it was “arbitrary” and poorly explained.
He said Trump had required agencies “to focus on eradicating anything that it labels as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (“DEI”), an undefined enemy.” He said he had tried and failed to get a clear definition of DEI and what it entailed.
When the 1st Circuit Court refused to lift the judge’s order, Trump’s Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer appealed to the Supreme Court in late July.
The solicitor general argued that Trump’s order rescinded an executive order from President Biden in 2021 that mandated “an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda” and instructed federal agencies to “allocate resources to address the historic failure to invest sufficiently, justly, and equally in underserved communities.”
He said the new administration decided these DEI-related grants “do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness.”
Their medical research focuses on potentially lifesaving breakthroughs in cancer treatment, and developing tools to more easily diagnose debilitating diseases. Their studies in mathematics could make online systems more robust and secure.
But as the academic year opens, the work of UCLA’s professors in these and many other fields has been imperiled by the Trump administration’s suspension of $584 million in grant funding, which University of California President James B. Milliken called a “death knell” to its transformative research.
The freeze came after a July 29 U.S. Department of Justice finding that the university had violated the civil rights of Jewish and Israeli students by providing an inadequate response to alleged antisemitism they faced after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.
The fight over the funding stoppage intensified Friday after the Trump administration demanded that UCLA pay a $1-billion fine, among other concessions, to resolve the accusations — and California Gov. Gavin Newsom said the state will sue, calling the proposal “extortion.”
Amid heightened tensions in Westwood, thousands of university academics are in limbo. In total, at least 800 grants, mostly from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, have been frozen.
UCLA scholars described days of confusion as they struggle to understand how the loss of grants would affect their work and scramble to uncover new funding sources — or roles that would ensure their continued pay, or that of their colleagues. While professors still have jobs and paychecks to draw on, many others, including graduate students, rely on grant funding for their salaries, tuition and healthcare.
At least for the moment, though, several academics told The Times that their work had not yet be interrupted. So far, no layoffs have been announced.
Sydney Campbell, a UCLA cancer researcher whose grant funding has been cut, stands inside the Biomedical Sciences Research building at UCLA.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Sydney Campbell, a pancreatic cancer researcher and postdoctoral scholar at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, said her work — which aims to understand how diet affects the disease — is continuing for now. She has an independent fellowship that “hopefully will protect the majority of my salary.” But others, she said, don’t have that luxury.
“It is absolutely going to affect people’s livelihoods. I already know of people … with families who are having to take pay cuts almost immediately,” said Campbell, who works for a lab that has lost two National Institutes of Health grants, including one that funds her research.
Pancreatic cancer is among the most deadly of cancers, but Campbell’s work could lead to a better understanding of it, paving the way for more robust prophylactic programs — and treatment plans — that may ultimately help tame the scourge.
“Understanding how diet can impact cancer development could lead to preventive strategies that we can recommend to patients in the future,” she said. “Right now we can’t effectively do that because we don’t have the information about the underlying biology. Our studies will help us actually be able to make recommendations based on science.”
Campbell’s work — and that of many others at UCLA — is potentially groundbreaking. But it could soon be put on hold.
“We have people who don’t know if they’re going to be able to purchase experimental materials for the rest of the month,” she said.
Fears of existential crisis
For some, the cuts have triggered something close to an existential crisis.
After professor Dino Di Carlo, chair of the UCLA Samueli Bioengineering Department, learned about 20 grants were suspended there — including four in his lab worth about $1 million — he felt a profound sadness. He said he doesn’t know why his grants were frozen, and there may not be money to pay his six researchers.
So Di Carlo, who is researching diagnostics for Lyme and other tick-borne diseases, took to LinkedIn, where he penned a post invoking the Franz Kafka novel “The Trial.” The unsettling tale is about a man named Josef K. who wakes up and finds himself under arrest and then on trial — with no understanding of the situation.
“Like Josef K., the people actually affected — the public, young scientists, patients waiting for better treatments and diagnostic tools — are left asking: What crime did we commit?” wrote Di Carlo. “They are being judged by a system that no longer explains itself.”
The LinkedIn post quickly attracted dozens of comments and more than 1,000 other responses. Di Carlo, who has been working to find jobs for researchers who depend on paychecks that come from now-suspended grants, said he appreciated the support.
But, goodwill has its limits. “It doesn’t pay the rent for a student this month,” he said.
Di Carlo’s research is partly focused on developing an at-home test that would detect Lyme and other tick-borne diseases, which are on the rise. Because no such product is currently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, he said, people who’ve experienced a tick bite have to wait for lab results to confirm their infection.
“This delay in diagnosis prevents timely treatment, allowing the disease to progress and potentially lead to long-term health issues,” he said. “A rapid, point-of-care test would allow individuals to receive immediate results, enabling early treatment with antibiotics when the disease is most easily addressed, significantly reducing the risk of chronic symptoms and improving health outcomes.”
Di Carlo lamented what he called “a continual assault on the scientific community” by the Trump administration, which has canceled billions of dollars in National Institutes of Health funding for universities across the country.
It “just … hasn’t let up,” Di Carlo said.
Scrambling for funds
Some professors who’ve lost grants have spent long hours scrambling to secure new sources of funding.
Di Carlo said he was in meetings all week to identity which researchers are affected by the cuts, and to try to figure out, “Can we support those students?” He has also sought to determine whether some could be moved to other projects that still have funding, or be given teaching assistant positions, among other options.
He’s not alone in those efforts. Mathematics professor Terence Tao also has lost a grant worth about $750,000. But Tao said that he was more distressed by the freezing of a $25-million grant for UCLA’s Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics. The funding loss for the institute, where Tao is director of special projects, is “actually quite existential,” he said, because the grant is “needed to fund operations” there.
Tao, who is the James and Carol Collins chair in the College of Letters and Sciences, said the pain goes beyond the loss of funds. “The abruptness — and basically the lack of due process in general — just compounds the damage,” said Tao. “We got no notice.”
A luminary in his field, Tao conducts research that examines, in part, whether a group of numbers are random or structured. His work could lead to advances in cryptography that may eventually make online systems — such as those used for financial transactions — more secure.
“It is important to do this kind of research — if we don’t, it’s possible that an adversary, for example, could actually discover these weaknesses that we are not looking for at all,” Tao said. “So you do need this extra theoretical confirmation that things that you think are working actually do work as intended, [and you need to] also explore the negative space of what doesn’t work.”
Tao said he’s been heartened by donations that the mathematics institute has received from private donors in recent days — about $100,000 so far.
“We are scrambling for short-term funding because we need to just keep the lights on for the next few months,” said Tao.
Rafael Jaime, president of United Auto Workers Local 4811, which represents 48,000 academic workers within the University of California — including about 8,000 at UCLA — said he was not aware of any workers who haven’t been paid so far, but that the issue could come to a head at the end of August.
He said that the UC system “should do everything that it can to ensure that workers aren’t left without pay.”
What comes next?
A major stressor for academics: the uncertainty.
Some researchers whose grants were suspended said they have not received much guidance from UCLA on a path forward. Some of that anxiety was vented on Zoom calls last week, including a UCLA-wide call attended by about 3,000 faculty members.
UCLA administrators said they are exploring stopgap options, including potential emergency “bridge” funding to grantees to pay researchers or keep up labs such as those that use rodents as subjects.
Some UCLA academics worried about a brain drain. Di Carlo said that undergraduate students he advises have begun asking for his advice on relocating to universities abroad for graduate school.
“This has been the first time that I’ve seen undergraduate students that have asked about foreign universities for their graduate studies,” he said. “I hear, ‘What about Switzerland? … What about University of Tokyo?’ This assault on science is making the students think that this is not the place for them.”
But arguably researchers’ most pressing concern is continuing their work.
Campbell explained that she has personally been affected by pancreatic cancer — she lost someone close to her to it. She and her peers do the research “for the families” who’ve also been touched by the disease.
“That the work that’s already in progress has the chance of being stopped in some way is really disappointing,” she said. “Not just for me, but for all those patients I could potentially help.”
NEW YORK — An executive order signed by President Trump this week aims to give political appointees power over the billions of dollars in grants awarded by federal agencies.
Scientists say it threatens to undermine the process that has helped make the U.S. the world leader in research and development.
The order issued Thursday requires all federal agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, to appoint officials responsible for reviewing federal funding opportunities and grants, so that they “are consistent with agency priorities and the national interest.”
It also requires agencies to make it so that current and future federal grants can be terminated at any time — including during the grant period.
Agencies cannot announce new funding opportunities until the new protocols are in place, according to the order.
The Trump administration said these changes are part of an effort to “strengthen oversight” and “streamline agency grantmaking.” Scientists say the order will cripple America’s scientific engine by placing control over federal research funds in the hands of people who are influenced by politics and lack relevant expertise.
“This is taking political control of a once politically neutral mechanism for funding science in the U.S.,” said Joseph Bak-Coleman, a scientist studying group decision-making at the University of Washington.
The changes will delay grant review and approval, slowing “progress for cures and treatments that patients and families across the country urgently need,” the Assn. of American Medical Colleges said in a statement.
The administration has already terminated thousands of research grants at agencies such as the NSF and NIH, on topics including transgender health, vaccine hesitancy, misinformation, and diversity, equity and inclusion. It has also threatened funding for scientific research in its battle with prominent universities, including Harvard and UCLA.
The order could affect emergency relief grants doled out by FEMA, public safety initiatives funded by the Department of Justice and public health efforts supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Experts say the order is likely to be challenged in court.
The Trump administration has frozen hundreds of science, medical and other federal grants to UCLA worth nearly $200 million, citing the university’s alleged “discrimination” in admissions and failure to “promote a research environment free of antisemitism.”
The decision to pull funding comes after Atty. Gen.Pam Bondi and the Justice Department said this week that UCLA would pay a “heavy price” for acting with “deliberate indifference” to the civil rights of Jewish and Israeli students who complained of antisemitic incidents since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, Israel’s ensuing war in Gaza and campus protests the events spurred last year.
The cancellation of grants is the first large-scale targeted funding claw-back against UCLA under the Trump administration. Until now, the White House has largely focused its attempts to remake higher education on elite East Coast schools such as Columbia, Brown and the University of Pennsylvania. Each has reached deals with the government in recent weeks over issues including admissions, Jewish student life, student discipline, antisemitism training and gender identity in sports.
In a letter to UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk dated Wednesday, the National Science Foundation wrote that it was terminating grants because “the University of California – Los Angeles continues to engage in race discrimination including in its admissions process, and in other areas of student life.”
An estimated 300 NSF grants totaling $180 million have been canceled. About half of the funds were already distributed. Before the letter was released Thursday, researchers were expecting the other half to follow.
In a letter to the university community Thursday, Frenk wrote that the canceled grants are from NSF, NIH and other federal agencies, but he did not give a dollar amount or list the other agencies. A partial list of terminated grants reviewed by The Times added up to roughly $200 million. The list was provided by a source who was not authorized to share the information.
Frenk called the government’s decision “deeply disappointing” and “a loss for Americans across the nation whose work, health, and future depend on the groundbreaking work we do.”
“In its notice to us, the federal government claims antisemitism and bias as the reasons,” Frenk wrote. “This far-reaching penalty of defunding life-saving research does nothing to address any alleged discrimination.”
Spokespersons for the NSF and NIH did not immediately reply to requests for comment Thursday.
The federal government’s decision to cut UCLA off from significant federal funds follows a similar playbook to its dealings with Ivy League institutions.
The Trump administration this spring canceled billions of dollars in federal grants to Harvard, which has sued in federal court to reverse the terminations and stop a Trump move to rescind its ability to host international students. Harvard is separately in negotiations with the White House to end the legal fight.
Columbia University this month agreed to pay more than $200 million to the federal government to resolve investigations over alleged antisemitism amid its response to 2024 pro-Palestinian protests. On Wednesday, Brown University also came to a $50-million agreement with the White House. The Brown payment will go toward Rhode Island workforce development programs.
The Department of Justice said this week that it had found UCLA guilty of violating the civil rights of Jewish and Israeli students. The department also indicated that it wanted to the university to enter into negotiations to avoid a federal lawsuit.
The department gave UCLA a Tuesday deadline to communicate its desire to negotiate. If not, the DOJ said, it was ready to sue by Sept. 2.
The University of California, in a statement, was unclear on whether it would settle or go to court.
“UCLA has addressed and will continue to address the issues raised in [the] Department of Justice notice,” Stett Holbrook, associate director of Strategic and Critical Communications, wrote in a statement Wednesday. He cited a $6.45-million settlement the university reached with Jewish students who had sued over claims that the 2024 encampment had discriminated against them.
“We have cooperated fully with the Department of Justice’s investigation and are reviewing its findings closely,” Holbrook wrote.
In his Thursday letter, Frenk shot back against the cuts.
“Let me be clear: Federal research grants are not handouts. Our researchers compete fiercely for these grants, proposing work that the government itself deems vital to the country’s health, safety and economic future,” he wrote.
“Grants lead to medical breakthroughs, economic advancement, improved national security and global competitiveness — these are national priorities,” Frenk wrote, adding that “we are actively evaluating our best course of action. We will be in constant communication as decisions move forward.”
In 2015, 2015, Amazon was trying to attract consumers in China. Now the Shanghai-based Amazon Web Services announced job layoffs last week as the e-commerce conglomerate shutters its artificial intelligence and development wing in China. File Photo by Stephen Shaver/UPI | License Photo
July 23 (UPI) —Amazon will shut down its AI research lab in a cost-cutting move as tensions flare with China and as other global companies seek to leave the nation because of Chinese influence.
The Shanghai-based Amazon Web Services announced job layoffs last week while as the conglomerate shutters its artificial intelligence and development wing.
It was due to “strategic adjustments amid U.S.-China tensions,” an applied scientist at the lab, Wang Minjie, wrote on WeChat early this week as Amazon disbanded the team.
It was not immediately clear how many people or jobs were affected.
The Shanghai facility was established in 2018 to focus on areas such as machine learning and processing natural language.
In a statement, company spokesman Brad Glasser said Amazon “made the difficult business decision to eliminate some roles across particular teams” in its AWS division.
Meanwhile, a growing number of American corporate giants, like Microsoft and IBM, have opted to either downsize or end operations in China as geopolitical tensions rise exasperated by U.S. President Donald Trump‘s fluctuating tariff policies.
It came the same day McKinsey & Company, a large U.S. defense contractor, also revealed it was pulling back its own AI base in China as companies look to other nations such as India.
About 300 India-based Chinese workers at FoxConn, Apple’s main iPhone producer, were ordered to return home earlier this month by Chinese authorities as Apple looks elsewhere, too, for its business operations.
Amazon has been actively retreating from China in recent years, going so far in 2019 to shut down the e-commerce giant’s Chinese marketplace.
Sweat covers Isaac Barnes’s face under his beekeeper’s veil as he hauls boxes of honeycomb from his hives to his truck. It is a workout in what feels like a sauna as the late-morning temperatures rise.
Though Barnes was hot, his bees were even hotter. Their body temperatures can be up to 15 degrees Celsius (27 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the air around them. As global temperatures rise, scientists are trying to better understand the effects on managed and wild bees as they pollinate crops, gather nectar, make honey, and reproduce.
They noticed flying bees gathering nectar avoided overheating on the hottest days by using fewer but harder wingbeats to keep their body temperature below dangerous levels, according to a study published last year. Scientists also say that bees, like people, may cope by retreating to a cooler environment such as the shade or their nest.
“Just like we go into the shade, sweat, or we might work less hard, bees actually do the exact same thing so they can avoid the heat,” said Jon Harrison, an environmental physiologist at Arizona State University and one of the study’s authors.
Generally, most bees are heat-tolerant, but as the climate warms, some experts think their ability to fend off disease and gather food might become more difficult. Habitat loss, increased use of pesticides, diseases, and lack of forage for both managed and wild bees are all listed as potential contributors to the global decline of bees and other pollinators.
Isaac Barnes places a full honeycomb onto the back of his truck. [Joshua A Bickel/AP Photo]
Earlier this year, preliminary results from the annual US Beekeeping Survey found that beekeepers lost almost 56 percent of their managed colonies, the highest loss since the survey started in 2010.
Almost all of the managed honeybee colonies in the United States are used to pollinate crops such as almonds, apples, cherries, and blueberries. Fewer pollinators can lead to less pollination and potentially lower yields.
Back at Isaac Barnes’s hives in Ohio, thousands of honeybees fly around as he gathers boxes to take back to his farm for honey production. Nearby, a couple of his bees land on milkweed flowers, a rare bit of plant diversity in an area dominated by maize and soya bean fields.
For Barnes, who operates Honeyrun Farm with his wife, Jayne, one of the challenges heat can pose to his 500 honeybee hives is fending off parasitic mites that threaten the bees. If temperatures get too hot, he cannot apply formic acid, an organic chemical that kills the mites. If it is applied when it is too hot, the bees could die.
Last year, they lost nearly a third of the 400 hives they sent to California to help pollinate commercial almond groves. Barnes thinks those hives may have been in poor health before pollination because they were unable to ward off mites when it was hot months earlier.
It is only in the last decade that people have become aware of the magnitude of the pollinator decline globally, said Harrison, of Arizona State University. Data is limited on how much climate change and heat stress are contributing to pollinator decline.
Bees are not able to do what they normally do, said Kevin McCluney, a biology professor at Bowling Green State University. [Joshua A Bickel/AP Photo]
The Trump administration’s proposed budget would eliminate the research programme that funds the US Geological Survey Bee Lab, which supports the inventory, monitoring and natural history of the nation’s wild bees. Other grants for bee research are also in jeopardy.
US Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon said his country’s pollinators are in “grave danger”, and he will fight for the federal funding. Pollinators contribute to the health of the planet, the crops we grow and the food we eat, he said.
“Rather than taking bold action to protect them, the Trump administration has proposed a reckless budget that would zero out funding for critical research aimed at saving important pollinators,” he said in a statement to The Associated Press news agency.
Harrison said his research on this topic would come to a halt if cuts are made to his federal funding, and it would generally be more difficult for scientists to study the disappearance of bees and other pollinators and improve how they prevent these losses. Not being able to manage these pollinator deaths could cause the price of fruits, vegetables, nuts, coffee and chocolate to rise or become scarce.
“Hopefully, even if such research is defunded in the US, such research will continue in Europe and China, preventing these extreme scenarios,” said Harrison.
July 8 (UPI) — Italian authorities arrested a Chinese national accused by the United States of working at the direction of Beijing to steal COVID-19 vaccine research from U.S. universities, immunologists and virologists during the early days of the pandemic.
Xu Zewei, 33, of China, was arrested Thursday in Malan. The nine-count indictment charging him and his co-conspirator, 44-year-old Chinese national Zhang Yu, was unsealed Tuesday by the Justice Department as it seeks Xu’s extradition. Zhang remains at large.
The arrest and filing of charges are the latest U.S. law enforcement action targeting Chinese nationals accused of working at the behest of Beijing’s foreign intelligence arm, the Ministry of State Security, in recent months.
According to the indictment, Xu and his coconspirators were involved in the China state-sponsored HAFNIUM hacking campaign — also known as Silk Typhoon — that targeted vulnerabilities in the widely used Microsoft Exchange Server program to gain access to victims’ information from February 2020 to June 2021.
Federal prosecutors said they used the vulnerabilities in the Microsoft program to install code known as webshells on their victims’ computers, gaining remote access to the devices.
The victims were not named in the charging document, but are identified as a university located in the Southern District of Texas and a university based in North Carolina involved in “research into COVID-19 vaccines, treatments and testing,” as well as a second university based in the southern district of Texas and a law firm with offices in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, including internationally.
During a press conference Tuesday, U.S. Attorney Nicholas Ganjei for the Southern District of Texas said Xu would be assigned targets from his handlers within the Ministry of State Security’s State Security Bureau with instruction to hack their computers and steal specific information.
Once with access to the requested accounts, he copied gigabits of COVID-19 research that he then transferred to China. Ganjei explained the law firm was targeted for the confidential information it had on its clients, specifically that of U.S. policy makers and government agencies.
“Although the Chinese state-sponsored hackers are, on occasion, indicted by the Department of Justice, it is exceedingly rare — indeed it is virtually unheard of — to actually get your hands on them,” he said.
“Since 2023, the United States has waited quietly and patiently for Xu to make a mistake that would put him within the reach of the American Judicial system. And last week, he did just that, traveling from Shanghai to Milan, Italy.”
Ganjei said Italian authorities took him into custody once his plane touched down.
He further described that alleged crimes as those not specifically targeting computers, but targeting “American scientific innovation” and the “American system of justice.”
“Although, the conduct in this case took place several years ago, we never lost sight of our goal to bring the perpetrators of these cyber intrusions to justice. Now, at least, some of that story can be told,” he said.
A little more than a week earlier, the Justice Department charged two Chinese nationals with spying on the U.S. Navy and its bases as well as assisting Beijing with recruiting others within the U.S. military as potential Ministry of State Security asstes.
Meanwhile, we are getting rid of medical researchers and weather forecasters, even as extreme and deadly weather events become more common.
Steve Lopez
Steve Lopez is a California native who has been a Los Angeles Times columnist since 2001. He has won more than a dozen national journalism awards and is a four-time Pulitzer finalist.
You would think — based on the priorities in President Trump’s budget, tax and policy bill approved last week — that immigration is the greatest threat to our health and security.
It’s not.
But billions of dollars have been added for border and ICE agents while billions more have been trimmed from medical, climate and weather-related resources.
On Monday morning, federal agents on horseback and in armored vehicles descended on MacArthur Park in a show of force. Children playing in the park were ushered to safer ground, Mayor Karen Bass said at a news conference.
“Frankly it is outrageous and un-American that we have federal armed vehicles in our parks when nothing is going on in our parks,” Bass said, adding that she didn’t know if anyone was even detained.
“It’s a political agenda of provoking fear and terror,” she said.
The event “looked like a staging for a TikTok video,” said City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson.
MacArthur Park has a sizable undocumented immigrant population, and a lot of big problems to tackle — homelessness, a wide-open drug trade and gang activity. On some days areas of the park were unusable for families. First responders rolled out on overdose calls, addicts took over an alley, and merchants struggled to stay open amid all the mayhem.
In December, people sit at the corner of Alvarado Street and Wilshire Boulevard, an area known for illegal drug use in the Westlake neighborhood.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
As I found last year over the course of several months on the ground, local officials waited too long and moved too slowly in response to the long-festering crisis.
But a silly military parade isn’t going to help, unless they actually were going after undocumented drug lords — but there was no immediate evidence of that.
If the federal government wanted to help, L.A. could use more support for housing, drug interdiction and treatment. It could use a more stable and equitable economy that’s not undermined by tariff uncertainties and the president’s taunts of trading partners.
As we know in California, countless industries rely on undocumented laborers. It’s an open secret, and has been for decades, not just in the Golden State but across the nation, and yet Washington has been unable to put together a sensible immigration reform package over the years.
That’s right. Trump threatened lackey GOP Congressman, ordering the spineless ninnies to pull their support.
Every time I see a helicopter now in L.A. — and as we know, they’re like mosquitoes up there — I wonder if Trump has sent in the Air Force, with bombers coming in behind them.
My colleague Rachel Uranga recently reported that “ICE has not released data on criminal records of detainees booked into its custody.” But nonpublic data from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, “showed about 9 out of 10 had never been convicted of a violent or property crime, and 30% have no criminal record. The most frequent crimes are immigration and traffic offenses.”
It’s nothing to warrant the terrorizing of neighborhoods and communities, nothing to warrant armed, masked agents of unknown identities and agencies roaming our streets and nabbing workers at car washes, Home Depots and restaurants.
Federal immigration agents near MacArthur Park in the Westlake area on Monday.
(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)
It’s almost as terrifying as several other real and existential threats:
An anti-vax crackpot is in charge of the nation’s healthcare and medical research system.
Some of the leading researchers in medicine and science are leaving the country in a trend that could end up being a catastrophic brain drain.
I got an email the other day from the Social Security Administration informing me the “(SSA) is celebrating the passage of the One Big, Beautiful Bill.” I thought it was a joke at first — a satirical take on the rise of an authoritarian regime.
Meteorologists say extreme weather events like the rainstorms that led to a river surge and killed dozens of children and adults in Texas’ Hill Country over the holiday weekend are going to become more common.
Florida had a record-tying number of hurricanes in 2024 with 11 of them, and $130 billion in damage.
Wildfires destroyed thousands of homes in Southern California last year and are becoming ever-more common around the world.
Temperatures in the Mediterranean Sea smashed records for June, and scientists are warning of dire impacts on sea life and food chains.
To the president and his minions, the crisis is overblown.
It’s fake news.
And the federal government can’t be distracted from its core mission.
The week is young, and there’s no telling which L.A. neighborhood will be invaded next.
Over the last several months, a deep sense of unease has settled over laboratories across the United States. Researchers at every stage — from graduate students to senior faculty — have been forced to shelve experiments, rework career plans, and quietly warn each other not to count on long-term funding. Some are even considering leaving the country altogether.
This growing anxiety stems from an abrupt shift in how research is funded — and who, if anyone, will receive support moving forward. As grants are being frozen or rescinded with little warning and layoffs begin to ripple through institutions, scientists have been left to confront a troubling question: Is it still possible to build a future in U.S. science?
On May 2, the White House released its Fiscal Year 2026 Discretionary Budget Request, proposing a nearly $18-billion cut from the National Institutes of Health. This cut, which represents approximately 40% of the NIH’s 2025 budget, is set to take effect on Oct. 1 if adopted by Congress.
“This proposal will have long-term and short-term consequences,” said Stephen Jameson, president of the American Assn. of Immunologists. “Many ongoing research projects will have to stop, clinical trials will have to be halted, and there’ll be the knock-on effects on the trainees who are the next generation of leaders in biomedical research. So I think there’s going to be varied and potentially catastrophic effects, especially on the next generation of our researchers, which in turn will lead to a loss of the status of the U.S. as a leader in biomedical research.“
In the request, the administration justified the move as part of its broader commitment to “restoring accountability, public trust, and transparency at the NIH.” It accused the NIH of engaging in “wasteful spending” and “risky research,” releasing “misleading information,” and promoting “dangerous ideologies that undermine public health.”
National Institutes of Health.
(NIH.gov)
To track the scope of NIH funding cuts, a group of scientists and data analysts launched Grant Watch, an independent project that monitors grant cancellations at the NIH and the National Science Foundation. This database compiles information from public government records, official databases, and direct submissions from affected researchers, grant administrators, and program directors.
As of July 3, Grant Watch reports 4,473 affected NIH grants, totaling more than $10.1 billion in lost or at-risk funding. These include research and training grants, fellowships, infrastructure support, and career development awards — and affect large and small institutions across the country. Research grants were the most heavily affected, accounting for 2,834 of the listed grants, followed by fellowships (473), career development awards (374) and training grants (289).
The NIH plays a foundational role in U.S. research. Its grants support the work of more than 300,000 scientists, technicians and research personnel, across some 2,500 institutions and comprising the vast majority of the nation’s biomedical research workforce. As an example, one study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that funding from the NIH contributed to research associated with every one of the 210 new drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration between 2010 and 2016.
Jameson emphasized that these kinds of breakthroughs are made possible only by long-term federal investment in fundamental research. “It’s not just scientists sitting in ivory towers,” he said. “There are enough occasions where [basic research] produces something new and actionable — drugs that will save lives.”
That investment pays off in other ways too. In a 2025 analysis, United for Medical Research, a nonprofit coalition of academic research institutions, patient groups and members of the life sciences industry, found that every dollar the NIH spends generates $2.56 in economic activity.
A ‘brain drain’ on the horizon
Support from the NIH underpins not only research, but also the training pipeline for scientists, physicians and entrepreneurs — the workforce that fuels U.S. leadership in medicine, biotechnology and global health innovation. But continued American preeminence is not a given. Other countries are rapidly expanding their investments in science and research-intensive industries.
If current trends continue, the U.S. risks undergoing a severe “brain drain.” In a March survey conducted by Nature, 75% of U.S. scientists said they were considering looking for jobs abroad, most commonly in Europe and Canada.
This exodus would shrink domestic lab rosters, and could erode the collaborative power and downstream innovation that typically follows discovery. “It’s wonderful that scientists share everything as new discoveries come out,” Jameson said. “But, you tend to work with the people who are nearby. So if there’s a major discovery in another country, they will work with their pharmaceutical companies to develop it, not ours.”
At UCLA, Dr. Antoni Ribas has already started to see the ripple effects. “One of my senior scientists was on the job market,” Ribas said. “She had a couple of offers before the election, and those offers were higher than anything that she’s seen since. What’s being offered to people looking to start their own laboratories and independent research careers is going down — fast.”
In addition, Ribas, who directs the Tumor Immunology Program at the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, says that academia and industry are now closing their door to young talent. “The cuts in academia will lead to less positions being offered,” Ribas explained. “Institutions are becoming more reluctant to attract new faculty and provide startup packages.” At the same time, he said, the biotech industry is also struggling. “Even companies that were doing well are facing difficulties raising enough money to keep going, so we’re losing even more potential positions for researchers that are finishing their training.”
This comes at a particularly bitter moment. Scientific capabilities are soaring, with new tools allowing researchers to examine single cells in precise detail, probe every gene in the genome, and even trace diseases at the molecular level. “It’s a pity,” Ribas said, “Because we have made demonstrable progress in treating cancer and other diseases. But now we’re seeing this artificial attack being imposed on the whole enterprise.”
Without federal support, he warns, the system begins to collapse. “It’s as if you have a football team, but then you don’t have a football field. We have the people and the ideas, but without the infrastructure — the labs, the funding, the institutional support — we can’t do the research.”
For graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in particular, funding uncertainty has placed them in a precarious position.
“I think everyone is in this constant state of uncertainty,” said Julia Falo, a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley and recording secretary of UAW 4811, the union for workers at the University of California. “We don’t know if our own grants are going to be funded, if our supervisor’s grants are going to be funded, or even if there will be faculty jobs in the next two years.”
She described colleagues who have had funding delayed or withdrawn without warning, sometimes for containing flagged words like “diverse” or “trans-” or even for having any international component.
The stakes are especially high for researchers on visas. As Falo points out for those researchers, “If the grant that is funding your work doesn’t exist anymore, you can be issued a layoff. Depending on your visa, you may have only a few months to find a new job — or leave the country.”
A graduate student at a California university, who requested anonymity due to the potential impact on their own position — which is funded by an NIH grant— echoed those concerns. “I think we’re all a little on edge. We’re all nervous,” they said. “We have to make sure that we’re planning only a year in advance, just so that we can be sure that we’re confident of where that funding is going to come from. In case it all of a sudden gets cut.”
The student said their decision to pursue research was rooted in a desire to study rare diseases often overlooked by industry. After transitioning from a more clinical setting, they were drawn to academia for its ability to fund smaller, higher-impact projects — the kind that might never turn a profit but could still change lives. They hope to one day become a principal investigator, or PI, and lead their own research lab.
Now, that path feels increasingly uncertain. “If things continue the way that they have been,” they said. “I’m concerned about getting or continuing to get NIH funding, especially as a new PI.”
Still, they are staying committed to academic research. “If we all shy off and back down, the people who want this defunded win.”
Rallying behind science
Already, researchers, universities and advocacy groups have been pushing back against the proposed budget cut.
On campuses across the country, students and researchers have organized rallies, marches and letter-writing campaigns to defend federal research funding. “Stand Up for Science” protests have occurred nationwide, and unions like UAW 4811 have mobilized across the UC system to pressure lawmakers and demand support for at-risk researchers. Their efforts have helped prevent additional state-level cuts in California: in June, the Legislature rejected Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed $129.7-million reduction to the UC budget.
Earlier this year, a coalition of public health groups, researchers and unions — led by the American Public Health Assn. — sued the NIH and Department of Health and Human Services over the termination of more than a thousand grants. On June 16, U.S. District Judge William Young ruled in their favor, ordering the NIH to reinstate over 900 canceled grants and calling the terminations unlawful and discriminatory. Although the ruling applies only to grants named in the lawsuit, it marks the first major legal setback to the administration’s research funding rollback.
Though much of the current spotlight (including that lawsuit) has focused on biomedical science, the proposed NIH cuts threaten research far beyond immunology or cancer. Fields ranging from mental health to environmental science stand to lose crucial support. And although some grants may be in the process of reinstatement, the damage already done — paused projects, lost jobs and upended career paths — can’t simply be undone with next year’s budget.
And yet, amid the fear and frustration, there’s still resolve. “I’m floored by the fact that the trainees are still devoted,” Jameson said. “They still come in and work hard. They’re still hopeful about the future.”
BOSTON — A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from making drastic cuts to research funding provided by the National Science Foundation.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston on Friday struck down a policy change that could have stripped universities of tens of millions of dollars in research funding. The universities argued that the move threatened crucial work in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, semiconductors and other technology fields.
Talwani said the change, announced by the NSF in May, was arbitrary, capricious and contrary to law.
An email Saturday to the National Science Foundation was not immediately returned.
At issue are “indirect” costs, expenses such as building maintenance and computer systems that aren’t linked directly to a specific project. Currently, the National Science Foundation determines each grant recipient’s indirect costs individually and is supposed to cover actual expenses.
The Trump administration has dismissed indirect expenses as “overhead” and capped them for future awards by the National Science Foundation to universities at 15% of the funding for direct research costs.
The University of California, one of the plaintiffs, estimated the change would cost it nearly $100 million a year.
Judges have blocked similar caps that the Trump administration placed on grants by the Energy Department and the National Institutes of Health.
Social media and video networks have become the main source of news in the US, overtaking traditional TV channels and news websites, research suggests.
More than half (54%) of people get news from networks like Facebook, X and YouTube – overtaking TV (50%) and news sites and apps (48%), according to the Reuters Institute.
“The rise of social media and personality-based news is not unique to the United States, but changes seem to be happening faster – and with more impact – than in other countries,” a report found.
Podcaster Joe Rogan was the most widely-seen personality, with almost a quarter (22%) of the population saying they had come across news or commentary from him in the previous week.
The report’s author Nic Newman said the rise of social video and personality-driven news “represents another significant challenge for traditional publishers”.
The institute also highlighted a trend for some politicians to give their time to sympathetic online hosts rather than mainstream interviewers.
It said populist politicians around the world are “increasingly able to bypass traditional journalism in favour of friendly partisan media, ‘personalities’, and ‘influencers’ who often get special access but rarely ask difficult questions, with many implicated in spreading false narratives or worse”.
Despite their popularity, online influencers and personalities were named as a major source of false or misleading information by almost half of people worldwide (47%) – putting them level with politicians.
The report also stated that usage of X for news is “stable or increasing across many markets”, with the biggest uplift in the US.
It added that since Elon Musk took over the network in 2022, “many more right-leaning people, notably young men, have flocked to the network, while some progressive audiences have left or are using it less frequently”.
In the US, the proportion that self-identified as being on the right tripled after Musk’s takeover.
In the UK, right-wing X audiences have almost doubled.
Rival networks like Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon are “making little impact globally, with reach of 2% or less for news”, it stated.
Other key findings about news sources:
TikTok is the fastest-growing social and video network, used for news by 17% of people around the world, up four percentage points since last year.
The use of AI chatbots to get the news is on the rise, and is twice as popular among under-25s than the population as a whole.
But most people think AI will make news less transparent, accurate and trustworthy.
All generations still prize trusted brands with a track record for accuracy, even if they don’t use them as often as they once did
The report is in its 14th year and surveyed almost 100,000 people in 48 countries.
California on Wednesday joined 15 other states filing suit against the National Science Foundation and its acting director, alleging the agency has illegally terminated millions of dollars in grants and imposed new fees that have ended or crippled research vital to health, the economy and the advancement of knowledge.
The Trump administration has defended its actions as both legal and necessary to align the NSF with the president’s priorities.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Southern District of New York, specifically targets the science foundation for “terminating grants for scientific research that seeks to promote and understand diversity in higher education and the workforce,” according to a statement from California Atty. General Rob Bonta.
The suit alleges that the NSF’s actions are illegally arbitrary and capricious and violate federal law on the management and use of federal funding.
Bonta’s office asserted that between 1995 and 2017, the number of women in science and engineering occupations, or with science or engineering degrees, doubled with help from federal support; minorities, meanwhile, went from representing about 15% in the occupations to about 35%.
The suit also seeks to overturn the Trump administration’s 15% cap on indirect costs related to research, which universities say are critical to carrying out their work. Such indirect costs include maintaining lab space, keeping the temperature controlled and the proper handling and disposal of biological, chemical and biochemical materials.
Like other key federal agencies, the National Science Foundation has been in turmoil since Trump took office in January — undergoing across-the-board funding cuts, layoffs and reorganization as well as apparent ideological litmus tests for research, sweeping grant terminations and a funding freeze on grant applications.
The Trump administration has fired back at critics.
Earlier this month Michael Kratsios, the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, criticized diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in federally funded research, calling them “close-minded” in a speech before the National Academy of Sciences in Washington.
Kratsios also called for a reduction of “red tape” in scientific research, the online news site FedScoop reported. He said there is a “crisis of confidence in scientists” that comes from fears that political biases are impacting research.
Trump officials also have repeatedly maintained that the federal government is rife with waste and fraud.
The federal actions have come at extreme cost, according to Bonta.
“President Trump wants to make America’s universities second tier with his backwards efforts to slash research funding that has kept us on the cutting edge of science and innovation,” Bonta said. “For more than 50 years, Congress has expressly authorized the National Science Foundation to train up the next generation of talent and invest in the infrastructure necessary to keep our position as a global leader” in science, technology, engineering and math.
“With President Trump’s latest round of indiscriminate funding cuts, America is poised to fall behind its competitors at a critical moment in the global technology race. We’re suing to stop him,” Bonta said.
In California, billions of dollars are at risk across the California State University, University of California and public community college systems.
“Many innovations — like the internet, GPS, and MRI technology — trace their origins to research initially funded by NSF. Without NSF funding, many California colleges and universities will be forced to substantially reduce or stop altogether potentially groundbreaking programs and research projects,” according to Bonta’s office.
Terminated NSF grants, for instance, include a five-year, $3-million project, “Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System.” This study examined crime data for patterns of racial bias while also looking at police misconduct and eviction policies, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Canceled UC Berkeley grants included projects on electoral systems and two on environmental science education.
The NSF has also told staff to screen grant proposals for “topics or activities that may not be in alignment with agency priorities” that had shifted under the Trump administration, the journal Nature reported.
The lawsuit lays out a wide range of benefits and goals of the federal funding.
“From developing AI technology that predicts weather patterns to protect communities, to developing sustainable solutions for environmental and economic challenges, to making power grids more sustainable, NSF-funded research at American universities ensures this nation’s status as a global leader in scientific innovation,” according to the lawsuit.
The other states involved in the litigation are Hawaii, New York, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Wisconsin and Washington.
The pattern of federal cuts and turmoil related to research also is playing out with the National Institutes of Health. And California also is party to a lawsuit over cuts to these grants.
Tara Kerin, a project scientist who works in pediatric infectious disease research at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, said that the funding cuts at the National Science Foundation echoed similar ones made at the National Institutes of Health.
That, she said, makes her “very nervous about the future of science and research.”
Kerin, whose work has partly focused on HIV prevention and detection in young adults, was funded by NIH grants — until they were cut this spring.
As the Trump administration cut billions of dollars in federal funding to scientific research, thousands of scientists in the U.S. lost their jobs or grants — and governments and universities around the world spotted an opportunity.
The Canada Leads program, launched in April, hopes to foster the next generation of innovators by bringing early-career biomedical researchers north of the border.
Aix-Marseille University in France started the Safe Place for Science program in March, pledging to welcome U.S.-based scientists who “may feel threatened or hindered in their research.”
Australia’s Global Talent Attraction Program, announced in April, promises competitive salaries and relocation packages.
“In response to what is happening in the U.S.,” said Anna-Maria Arabia, head of the Australian Academy of Science, “we see an unparalleled opportunity to attract some of the smartest minds here.”
Since World War II, the U.S. has invested huge amounts of money in scientific research conducted at independent universities and federal agencies. That funding helped the U.S. to become the world’s leading scientific power — and has led to the invention of cellphones and the internet as well as new ways to treat cancer, heart disease and strokes, noted Holden Thorp, editor in chief of the journal Science.
But today that system is being shaken.
Since President Trump took office in January, his administration has pointed to what it calls waste and inefficiency in federal science spending and made major cuts to staff levels and grant funding at the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, NASA and other agencies, while slashing research dollars that flow to some private universities.
The White House budget proposal for next year aims to cut the NIH budget by roughly 40% and the National Science Foundation budget by 55%.
“The Trump administration is spending its first few months reviewing the previous administration’s projects, identifying waste, and realigning our research spending to match the American people’s priorities and continue our innovative dominance,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said.
Already, several universities have announced hiring freezes, laid off staff or stopped admitting new graduate students. On Thursday, the Trump administration revoked Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students, though a judge put that on hold.
Research institutions abroad are watching with concern for collaborations that depend on colleagues in the U.S. — but they also see opportunities to poach talent.
“There are threats to science … south of the border,” said Brad Wouters of University Health Network, Canada’s leading hospital and medical research center, which launched the Canada Leads recruitment drive. “There’s a whole pool of talent, a whole cohort that is being affected by this moment.”
Academic freedom
Universities worldwide are always trying to recruit from one another, just as tech companies and businesses in other fields do. What’s unusual about the current moment is that many global recruiters are targeting researchers by promising something that seems newly threatened: academic freedom.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said this month that the European Union intends “to enshrine freedom of scientific research into law.” She spoke at the launch of the bloc’s Choose Europe for Science initiative, which was in the works before the Trump administration cuts but has sought to capitalize on the moment.
Eric Berton, president of Aix-Marseille University, expressed a similar sentiment after launching the institution’s Safe Place for Science program.
“Our American research colleagues are not particularly interested by money,” he said of applicants. “What they want above all is to be able to continue their research and that their academic freedom be preserved.”
Imminent ‘brain drain’?
It’s too early to say how many scientists will choose to leave the U.S. It will take months for universities to review applications and dole out funding, and longer for researchers to uproot their lives.
Plus, the American lead in funding research and development is enormous — and even significant cuts may leave crucial programs standing. The U.S. has been the world’s leading funder of research and development — including government, university and private investment — for decades. In 2023, the country funded 29% of the world’s R&D, according to the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science.
But some institutions abroad are reporting significant early interest from researchers in the U.S. Nearly half of the applications to Safe Place for Science — 139 out of 300 total — came from U.S.-based scientists, including AI researchers and astrophysicists.
U.S.-based applicants in this year’s recruitment round for France’s Institute of Genetics, Molecular and Cellular Biology roughly doubled over last year.
At the Max Planck Society in Germany, the Lise Meitner Excellence Program — aimed at young female researchers — drew triple the number of applications from U.S.-based scientists this year as last year.
Recruiters who work with companies and nonprofits say they see a similar trend.
Natalie Derry, a U.K.-based managing partner of the Global Emerging Sciences Practice at recruiter WittKieffer, said her team has seen a 25% to 35% increase in applicants from the U.S. cold-calling about open positions. When they reach out to scientists currently based in the U.S., “we are getting a much higher hit rate of people showing interest.”
Still, there are practical hurdles to overcome for would-be continent-hoppers, she said. That can include language hurdles, arranging child care or elder care, and significant differences in national pension or retirement programs.
Brandon Coventry never thought he would consider a scientific career outside the United States. But federal funding cuts and questions over whether new grants will materialize have left him unsure. While reluctant to leave his family and friends, he’s applied to faculty positions in Canada and France.
“I’ve never wanted to necessarily leave the United States, but this is a serious contender for me,” said Coventry, who is a postdoctoral fellow studying neural implants at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
But it’s not easy to pick up and move a scientific career — let alone a life.
Marianna Zhang was studying how children develop race and gender stereotypes as a postdoctoral fellow at New York University when her National Science Foundation grant was canceled. She said it felt like “America as a country was no longer interested in studying questions like mine.”
Still, she wasn’t sure of her next move. “It’s no easy solution, just fleeing and escaping to another country,” she said.
The recruitment programs range in ambition, from those trying to attract a dozen researchers to a single university to the continent-wide Choose Europe for Science initiative.
But it’s unclear whether the total amount of funding and new positions offered could match what’s being shed in the United States.
A global vacuum
Even as universities and institutes think about recruiting talent from the U.S., there’s more apprehension than glee at the funding cuts.
“Science is a global endeavor,” said Patrick Cramer, head of the Max Planck Society, noting that datasets and discoveries are often shared among international collaborators.
One aim of recruitment drives is “to help prevent the loss of talent to the global scientific community,” he said.
Researchers worldwide will suffer if collaborations are shut down and databases taken offline, scientists say.
“The U.S. was always an example, in both science and education,” said Patrick Schultz, president of France’s Institute of Genetics, Molecular and Cellular Biology. So the cuts and policies were “very frightening also for us because it was an example for the whole world.”
Larson, Ramakrishnan and Keaten write for the Associated Press.
