Chaos erupts in US science as Trump’s team declares freeze on federal grants

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Researchers in the United States are reeling after the administration of President Donald Trump issued an order on 27 January that froze a vast array of federal grants and loans. A federal judge temporarily blocked the order on 28 January, but many US universities had already advised faculty members against spending federal grant dollars. In a subsequent memo, the Trump administration attempted to clarify what was and wasn’t covered by the freeze, but it included no information specific to scientific funding and did not say when the pause would be lifted, leaving scientists worried about its long-term effects. “It will be much easier to destroy the world’s greatest scientific ecosystem than it will be to try to rebuild it,” says developmental biologist Carole LaBonne.

Nature | 6 min read

When a species gets protection under the US Endangered Species Act (ESA), the studies cited tend to come from small, specialist journals rather than blockbuster publications such as Nature. Almost 90% of ESA citations between 2012 and 2016 came from journals with an impact factor of less than 4 or no impact factor at all. The most influential journal: Pacific Science, a regional journal with a conventional impact factor of just 0.74. The problem is that publishing in smaller journals isn’t necessarily great for your career — an issue that suggests conservation science needs better ways of measuring impact.

Nature | 6 min read

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) — mysterious, millisecond-long flashes of energy — might be even weirder than we thought. Most FRBs are thought to come from magnetars, dead stars that usually form in young galaxies and host powerful magnetic fields. Now, astronomers have traced the origin of an FRB to the edge of an ancient galaxy in which stellar activity has slowed, which provides evidence that at least some FRBs must come from another source. “The FRB origin story is far from boring, and certainly far from solved,” says astronomer Wen-fai Fong.

Nature | 4 min read

Reference: The Astrophysical Journal Letters paper 1 & paper 2

Features & opinion

Plans to ramp up fossil-fuel extraction in the United States doesn’t have to spell the end of decarbonization efforts or lead to further environmental degradation, argues energy geographer Jennifer Baka. What matters now is that it’s done right. The regulation of energy projects must be widened to consider factors such as how the infrastructure needed to run them impacts the local area. “The economic and environmental trade-offs of drilling can then be better evaluated,” Baka writes. “It is key to fostering industrial growth while avoiding an environmental catastrophe.”

Nature | 5 min read

In his book The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad, author Simon Parkin tells the story of the city’s Plant Institute — the world’s first proper seed bank — during the 1941-1944 Nazi siege. “The institute’s staff members sacrificed themselves, one by one, to protect a collection for which the whole raison d’être was to one day save humanity from starvation,” writes reviewer Simon Ings. Despite unthinkable privation, Vadim Stepanovich Lekhnovich, the curator of the tuber collection, later said that “it wasn’t difficult not to eat the collection. It was impossible to eat this, your life’s work, the work of the lives of your colleagues.”

Nature | 7 min read

Infographic of the week

The human genome encodes potentially thousands of tiny ‘dark proteins’ that were previously overlooked. Now the search is on to find out what they do. (Nature | 12 min read)

Today I’m gazing at two new spectacular views: a 2.5-billion-pixel composite image of our closest galactic neighbour, the Andromeda Galaxy, shows 200 million stars and took more than 10 years to gather. And a stunning shot of our own dear Earth, taken from a spacecraft en route to the Moon, which was launched by the private company Firefly Aerospace earlier this month.

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Flora Graham, senior editor, Nature Briefing

With contributions by Jacob Smith

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