Research support
revere | February 3, 2008After our recent rant on the necessity of supporting the public health and social services infrastructure instead of cutting taxes, President Bush has replied. He is cutting the infrastructure:
President Bush's $3 trillion budget for next year slashes mental health funding and rural health care and freezes spending on medical research, among the cuts outlined in budget documents obtained by The Associated Press.
The budget for the Department of Health and Human Services would be reduced by almost 3 percent under the Bush budget plan to be released Monday. The $2 billion in HHS cuts are about…
revere | January 17, 2008I think it's safe to say most Americans couldn't give a rat's ass about funding for physics research in the US. So even fewer will cry about a story in New Scientist that the American physics research effort is starting to buckle under the weight of budget cuts:
The reality of the US budget cuts to particle physics has hit home. The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California, US, has just announced a trio of painful consequences: the end of work on the International Linear Collider, the imminent closure of its BaBar antimatter experiment, and the layoff of 125 workers.
SLAC and…
revere | December 19, 2007Bush and the Democratic Congress are still battling over the budget, although it is said they are getting closer. Getting closer to Bush unfortunately means giving him all the bombs and bullets he wants but not much else. A case in point is the latest proposal for the NIH and CDC budgets:
Over the weekend, Congress prepared a new version of appropriations following President George Bush's veto of previous bill in November. This new bill includes $760 million less for NIH and $240 million less for CDC than the vetoed bill, according to news reports today.
The result is an increase of less…
revere | December 3, 2007Carnegie-Mellon is a great university and when it comes to robotics and computer science is always on the cutting edge. But does that cutting edge have to be so sharply lethal?
Unmanned aircraft are showing up in the skies more often and today the US Army awarded $14.4 million to Carnegie Mellon to build a remote-controlled unmanned tank.
A certain amount of the award will go toward significantly improving the Crusher, a 6.5-ton unmanned support vehicle Carnegie engineers developed in 2006 in conjunction with DARPA. Since its introduction, the Crusher has demonstrated unparalleled toughness…
revere | April 27, 2007I will admit to having a soft spot in my heart for one of the NIH institutes, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. NIEHS is on a separate campus in Research Triangle Park, NC, away from the main NIH campus in Bethesda, MD. It is separated in other ways, too, having a decidedly more public health focus than the other institutes. Its mission, like other NIH institutes, is to ferret out the basic causes of illness, in NIEHS's case, environmentally caused or influenced illness. Its interest in cancer caused by industrial chemicals, asthma from air pollution, reproductive and…