NIH Cuts Will Cost Triangle Universities Millions. Now NC Is Suing Trump To Block Action.

New guidance Friday from the National Institutes of Health has sent a tremor through U.S. research institutions, including the Triangle’s two largest, as Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill stand to lose hundreds of millions in federal funding if a governmental cap on indirect medical research payments survives a legal challenge. “We’re talking about massive layoffs across the Triangle if this (rule) holds,” former UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Holden Thorp said in a phone interview Monday. Duke and UNC each rank among the top 15 recipients of NIH grants in the nation. In 2023, they received a combined $1.2 billion from the agency, accounting for more than half the state’s total NIH funding. Duke had 1,025 awards that year alone while UNC reported 1,020.

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Risk of Heart Defects Higher in Babies Conceived With I.V.F.

The birth defects were more likely, but still very uncommon, in infants conceived through certain fertility treatments, a large study found.

Are the Internet and AI affecting our memory? What the science says

Adrian Ward had been driving confidently around Austin, Texas, for nine years — until last November, when he started getting lost. Ward’s phone had been acting up, and Apple Maps had stopped working. Suddenly, Ward couldn’t even find his way to the home of a good friend, making him realize how much he’d relied on the technology in the past. “I just instinctively put on the map and do what it says,” he says.

Ward’s experience echoes a common complaint: that the Internet is undermining our memory. This fear has shown up in several surveys over the past few years, and even led one software firm to coin the term ‘digital amnesia’ for the experience of forgetting information because you know a digital device has stored it instead. Last year, Oxford University Press announced that its word of the year was ‘brain rot’ — the deterioration of someone’s mental state caused by consuming trivial online content.

Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review

The Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review (ELPAR) is published by the Environmental Law Institute’s (ELI’s) Environmental Law Reporter (ELR) in partnership with Vanderbilt University Law School. For seventeen years, ELPAR has provided a forum for presentation and discussion of the best environmental law and policy-relevant ideas from the legal academic literature. Published as an annual special issue of ELR, ELPAR is designed to fill the same important niche by helping to bridge the gap between academic scholarship and environmental policymaking.