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A vaccine research centre on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.Credit: Alamy
The US health-research community is in turmoil this week following the Trump administration’s abrupt cancellation of research-grant reviews, travel and training for scientists inside and outside the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s largest public biomedical funder. Without advisory-committee meetings, 80% of the agency’s US$47-billion budget to fund research is temporarily frozen. Researchers who spoke to Nature say that although there can often be a short pause to reorient at the start of a new administration, the length and reach of this freeze — which is set to last until at least 1 February — is unprecedented.
A Chinese-built large language model called DeepSeek-R1 is stepping up as an affordable rival to ‘reasoning’ models such as OpenAI’s o1. R1 matched o1’s performance on certain tasks in chemistry, mathematics and coding, and has been released as ‘open-weight’, which means that researchers can study and build on the algorithm. “The openness of DeepSeek is quite remarkable,” says AI researcher Mario Krenn, since OpenAI’s models are “essentially black boxes”.
Uncertainty plagues the genetic-testing industry as the once-thriving at-home DNA testing company 23andMe circles the drain. Founded in 2006, the firm was at one stage valued at US$6 billion and has sequenced the DNA of some 15 million people. The future of that data is now uncertain. Part of the reason behind the company’s fall from grace is that DNA-testing kits are largely a one-time product, say observers. The firm has also made only a few deals with pharmaceutical companies for medical research, despite having one of the biggest DNA collections in the world.
Features & opinion
There’s no such thing as free will, argues neuroscientist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky in his new book, Determined. Not only are we “not captains of our ships”, he writes, “our ships never had captains.” Sapolsky’s goal is humanitarian, writes historian of science Jessica Riskin in her review: “he wants us not to blame anyone for anything they’ve done, since they had no choice.” But Sapolsky’s evidence for determinism isn’t up to the job, says Riskin. “Science can’t prove there’s no free will because the question of free will is not a scientific question but a philosophical one.”
The New York Review of Books | 18 min read (free reg required)
A teleportation customer-service line takes the needs of its users very seriously in Please listen carefully because our menu options have recently changed.
Andrew Robinson’s pick of the top five science books to read this week includes an illustrated guide to colour in the natural world and an exploration of how imagining the future affects us in the present.
To become a professor in Honduras, you need to contribute to the community. In Ireland, you need to publish papers, but also be publicly visible. And in the United States, your publication record takes primacy. Those are some of the results of a study that identified trends in the academic-promotion criteria of nearly 250 universities and government agencies worldwide. The results show that finding the right candidates must be more than a box-ticking exercise, says study co-author Yensi Flores Bueso — especially if we hope to build the diverse teams that science needs. “You don’t build a good football team just by having excellent quarterbacks,” she tells the Nature Podcast.
Nature Podcast | 33 min listen
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Today, Leif Penguinson is splashing around in a waterfall in Danska Fall nature reserve, Halmstad, Sweden. Can you find the penguin?
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Flora Graham, senior editor, Nature Briefing
With contributions by Jacob Smith
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