In the News

A couple more news items of interest:

President Bush is proposing more money for weather monitoring. From AP Press:

"A critical report last year by the National Academy of Sciences contended the government was unprepared for collecting vital information about global warming. It noted that NASA's Earth sciences research budget had been effectively cut by 30 percent since 2000 and the report prompted changes in the government's Earth observing plans, officials said...
Two new satellites, listed as top priorities by the National Academy, were included in Bush's budget proposal. They would map critical soil moisture around the world and replace an aging satellite that monitors shrinking ice worldwide. The NASA budget includes money for four other satellites, but the agency hasn't yet decided which ones to build, Stern said."

At the same time, the President proposed no budget increase for NIH (for the sixth year in a row) though the physical sciences will get a boost. From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

"Over all, federal money for basic research across all agencies would rise by 3 percent, to $29.32-billion. About 60 percent of this money flows to universities. Administration officials said, in essence, that scientists should consider themselves lucky, because Mr. Bush's plan would increase by only 0.3 percent spending for all other nondefense, "discretionary" programs, whose budgets are not automatically set by law.

But biomedical researchers hardly took it that way. The flat line for the NIH, the largest source of funds for academic research, was for many of them an unwelcome version of Groundhog Day, the movie in which the same bad day in February recurs repeatedly. Mr. Bush's proposal of $29.47-billion for the agency drew boos from scientific and higher-education groups, which called it "a disaster" and "shortsighted.""