Archive for April 2025

On a Friday evening in February, the National Institutes of Health announced it was dropping indirect-cost (IDC) rates on research grants to 15 percent. Guidance issued by the Office of the Director said it wanted to make U.S. medical research the best in the world by reducing “administrative overhead” to allowed increased spending on “direct scientific research costs”… and made it effective the following Monday. Implementation is paused pending full judicial review, but even if the courts deny this change policymakers could choose to revisit the issue.

Judges are finding a growing number of criminal defendants in New York City’s state courts mentally unfit to stand trial, meaning their charges must either be dropped or they must be held in hospitals, not in jail, according to city health data obtained by Gothamist. But the hospitals where the defendants are supposed to go for treatment can’t keep up with the increasing demand, mental health officials, researchers and legal experts said. Instead, the defendants are being held on Rikers Island, which faces the threat of a federal takeover amid high rates of violence.

Investigators have linked difficult early life experiences with reduced quality and quantity of the white matter communication highways throughout the adolescent brain. This reduced connectivity is also associated with lower performance on cognitive tasks.

A long-stalled EU proposal to broaden anti-discrimination protections faces withdrawal, prompting urgent calls to salvage its vital principles amidst rising inequality.

We need working class people of all backgrounds – people like you – to run and serve if we are going to make progress on economic, social, and climate justice.

A study by the European Transport Safety Council found that in a collision between a modest-size SUV (sports utility vehicle) weighing 1,600kg and a lighter car weighing 1,300kg, the risk of fatal injury decreases by 50% for the occupants of the heavier car but increases by almost 80% for the occupants of the lighter car. Similarly, pedestrians and cyclists are more likely to be killed if the car that strikes them has a bonnet that is higher off the road than average, a typical feature of an SUV.