The Scoop on US Science Funding - DTNSB 4972
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love guaranteed to fit every time eBay things people love this is the Daily Tech News for Monday March 10th 2025 we tell you what you need to know follow up on the context of those stories and try to help each other understand today Dr Nikki updates us on the changes in the U.S federal funding for the sciences and we have some feedback from you I'm Tom Merritt and I'm Rob Dunwood let's start with what you need to know with the big story

At WWDC last summer, Apple touted a smarter Siri. It was going to be able to access your personal info to learn about you safely, see what's on your screen and take actions in the apps for you. All of this would be happening on your device, but it would make it so easy to just talk to Apple intelligence and make stuff happen. And last week, we mentioned that Apple said, yeah, those features take it a little longer to arrive and will be here, quote,

in the coming year, which has set off a debate across the internet about what in the coming year means. Does it mean by the end of 2025? Does it mean between now and sometime a year later in 2026? They haven't said. There are, however, three main theories out there for why this delay is even being acknowledged.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has said in the past that the company is taking extra time to squash bugs. That makes sense. A few others say they believe it's taking time to integrate the new Siri with the old Siri, which in my mind is kind of another longer way of saying to squash bugs. And in what you might also consider an extension of to squash bugs, developer Simon Willison suggests that Apple is trying to keep Siri secure against prompt injection attacks. And that is complicated.

A prompt injection attack is when a malicious actor fools a large language model into replacing its safeguards with new instructions favorable to the attacker.

With Apple intelligence able to access personal information and do things inside your apps, and with Apple saying, don't worry, this is all on device, it's super secure, it's important to make sure that that can't be hijacked by a malicious actor and then become not secure. Also, there is no widely accepted defense against prompt injection attacks yet. So Apple would have to invent one, which could take some time.

Uh, German now says a true modernized conversational version of Siri might not arrive until iOS 20. And he puts in at best iOS 20 is expected to be announced in 2026. So,

Not really a whole lot of news there other than we have some more theories about why and Gurman saying, yeah, it's definitely not coming soon. In other Apple news, the reviews of the new M3 powered iPad Air are out and they all agree with what I said last week. It's a nice spec upgrade. If you're in the market for a new tablet, you know, you might want to grab one of those. Also, most reviewers wish they had upgraded the screen. They didn't. It's the same screen technology, LCD screen.

I saw this on the top of tech meme on the top of Google news, on top of several subreddits. Rob, why are reviews for a minor spec bump on a tablet, not even a more widely used device dominating the news today? Any Apple news is kind of like I'm watching NBA right now. It's kind of like the Lakers or the Golden State Warriors. Any news is what Earth kind of wants to hear. So it's just going to be overreported.

And these are nice spec upgrades. So if people who are in the market for getting a new iPad, folks are saying this is not a bad one to get to. The screen probably could have used a bump, but it is something that people are interested in. And therefore, everyone who had one of these things under embargo talked about it all at the same time. Yeah.

Yeah. And we get this all the time from folks. Why do you always cover Apple? Why do you always cover Google? And you're right. If you follow sports, Rob's analogy is perfect. It's the winning teams in the big markets get covered more because more people are interested in them. And I suppose that's true of the iPad as well. Samsung spec bumps, I'm sure, are

just as good, if not better than what Apple did, but there's just fewer people using a Samsung Galaxy tablet out there.

I'm the only person that I know personally that actually has an Android tablet. So it's kind of like, you know, they're fairly popular from an Android standpoint. So yeah, Apple is just hot and people like to hear the hotness. So that's why folks talk about it. I would throw in, there's a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy there because I feel like search engine optimization is,

an Apple story because it knows people are into them. And so if you put an Apple story out there, it gets picked up more. It gets put in search engine more. It gets put on the top of algorithmically generated things like Google news more tech meme is a combination of algorithm and human. So it's a combo there, but yeah, I,

I sometimes have the same reaction to some of our audience where I'm like, really? Like, it's just a review of a tablet. Like, we don't cover review summaries for most products that come out. Why is this one getting so much attention? And I think we covered why. There you go. Now you know. We're thinking about it, folks. Just know that.

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There's more we need to know today. Let's get right to the briefs.

A widespread bug in Chromecast Audio and Chromecast V2 Chromecast devices is causing many users to get the error message, quote, untrusted device name couldn't be verified. This could be caused by an outdated device firmware, end quote. Chromecast 3rd Gen and newer appear to be unaffected. Google has not made any end-of-life announcements about the devices, despite them both being almost 10 years old. Google says it's aware of an issue with the Chromecast V2 and Chromecast Audio devices and working on a fix.

yeah i don't usually like us to to cover outages but this one is unique in that it's really old devices which might make you think oh they're just not supporting them but

But Google appears to be reacting as if they should work. So I'm curious why it didn't work. But yeah, it's a lot of devices out there to support. They definitely are. I've got a bunch myself. In fact, I have the very first Chromecast I ever owned, and it still works. I keep it in a laptop bag and plug it in when I go to hotels. Yeah, you haven't plugged it in this weekend, have you? Not this weekend, no. We'll see. We'll see if you plug it in, if it works next time.

In chip maker news, Foxconn is trying to appear something innovative, I guess, by announcing it has developed its own large language model called FoxBrain. See there, Foxconn. And this is like a... Anyway, the company developed it with NVIDIA. It uses Meta's Lama 3.1. They made it for their own internal use, but they're planning to open source it for companies to use in manufacturing and supply chain management. Foxconn's been taking a little heat lately

for slowing growth. They're still growing, but the growth has been slowing. So they've been trying to do things like automotive. And this is probably another example of them trying to show that they can play in multiple markets. Meanwhile, the king of the hill right now is TSMC. They make the chips for everybody. They are the bellwether of health in the chip industry. And TSMC announced revenue rose 39% in the first two months of 2025. That's better than all of 2024 when they rose 34%. So TSMC,

AI chip sales do not appear to have slowed down. Not at all. If TSMC is any indicator, I mean, 40% growth. Yeah, that is significant. And they make the chips. And they're already like at the top of the heap. So the fact that they can increase that much is pretty impressive.

Security researcher Solstice has developed a tool called Chirp that uses audio tones to transmit data between computers. 100 words takes about 70 seconds to transmit, so it's not fast. Also, transmitting computers can't hear incoming transmissions. The developer is now working on hypersonic tones so that humans won't know when the audio is transmitting. Chirp is open source and available as an app.

and online service for free through GitHub. Yeah, let me just fend off the person writing the email. This isn't new. No, we know this isn't new. Like this is just a new take on it. It's a fun take on it. It's kind of showing a method of air gapping, right?

Of jumping the air gap, I mean, between computers. If you could do this hypersonically, computers could be talking about it and you wouldn't hear it yourself. So you'd have to monitor it some other way. I think it's fun. You know, yes, this sort of thing could potentially be used for malicious purposes, but knowing it exists helps you not use it for that and making it available for people to play with is kind of fun.

It reminds me of those spy movies where they point the laser at the window and vibration happening in the room. And it's like, yeah, the computer's just doing that. So it is kind of cool tech, really, really slow, but kind of cool nonetheless.

Shanghai's Agibot has launched a software model that can help humanoid robots understand and perform real-world tasks. Genie Operator One, or Go One, can understand natural language, uses computer vision to understand human actions, and can learn from video and generalize from a small amount of training data. So the big advance here is you put this in a robot and then it can learn really fast to do something. Right now, humanoid robots kind of have to be pre-programmed for everything.

A robot using Go 1 has been demonstrated making toast, making coffee, handing out badges at a receptionist desk. So you kind of get where they're coming and what they think the use of this robot might be. Agibot began manufacturing its robots last year, so it's already making

the carriage for this. This is just the software that would upgrade what it can do. There are other folks doing this as well. California's Figure AI, Shenzhen's UB Tech Robotics, they are also making and in some cases deploying humanoid robots.

This is a cool story until I think about all the movies, probably about 75% of the movies that have robots and AI, but they're just not good to us. But this is, this is pretty cool what they're doing. Yeah. This, this is still far from the robots turning on us. Uh, but you know, uh, you teaching them to make you coffee, uh, just make sure to say thanks. That's all I'm going to just, it can't hurt to say thanks.

As some suspected, you will need to log in with a Microsoft account to play Forza Horizon 5 on the PS5 when it arrives on April 29th, according to a FAQ on the game's official website. This is the same as Steam version, but PS5 players also need a PlayStation Plus subscription to access multiplayer. Yeah, you don't even get to save games into your Xbox account with this. You are simply telling Microsoft who you are when you sign up for this, and they're collecting data on you. So I get why this is going to ruffle some feathers. Yeah.

We kind of knew this was coming, though. I mean, they've been telegraphing this for a while. Google forced an update for the 2020 Pixel 4a recently that reduced its battery life significantly and caused the company to offer battery replacements and store credit toward new phones. In fact, we talked to Dr. Nikki, who had a Pixel 4a, about the process that she went through.

It appears that the reason that they forced this update was to reduce fire risk. That makes all of this make a lot more sense to me. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's product safety arm issued a recall for the Pixel 4a late last week. The recall was issued not to make you turn the phone back in, but to get users to do the firmware update to quote, "mitigate the risk of overheating because an overheating battery could pose a risk of fire and or burns to a user."

So if Australia was telling Google this recall was coming, Google would push out a fix that reduces the risk of that harm so that they comply with the recall. And in the process, it killed the battery life. And Google's like, well, we have to do this. So let's offer some, you know, some compensation. I think a lot of people are wondering, why are you killing the battery life on an old device like that? And of course, the

The conclusion everybody jumped to was, oh, it's planned obsolescence. They want to get people to buy new stuff. But it appears this is probably the reason.

People have to remember that batteries are chemistry sets. And the older they get, the more aware they get. They can become dangerous if Google does not do things like this and fix it so that they don't blow up in your pocket or burn you or just do things that are generally not perceived as being good. Yeah. No, it's a really good reminder that we kind of take them for granted because they do behave well most of the time. But that doesn't mean they always will.

At Paris Fashion Week, Meta announced the new Ray-Ban Meta Copernic glasses. They use the typical Ray-Ban style frame, but in a transparent black with Copernic brand and gray mirror lenses. Copernic often uses tech in his fashion. It makes a handbag that looks like the iOS handbag emoji. For this announcement, it held a 200-person LAN party and had models record from the runway while wearing the new glasses. 3,600 pairs of the Copernic glasses will be made and sell for $549.00.

A 24-hour LAN party being an element in a Paris Fashion Week announcement is not something I would have predicted back when LAN parties first became a thing in the 90s. Would you?

Not on my bingo card, but hey, I mean, we do different things these days, man. It's like tech is fashion and fashion is tech. It's tech, right? Yeah, it's crazy. Finally, research company Fuji Keizai projects Japan's service robot market will triple by 2023. Driving the need for robots is an expected labor shortfall. They're expecting a shortfall of 11 million by 2040. And the fact that 40% of the population is going to be over 65 by 2065.

Bloomberg notes that Japan's largest restaurant chain, Skylark, already uses around 3,000 robots to bring food to tables. And when I go to Japan, I'm going to try to eat at a Skylark to check out how that works. You will definitely have to report back if you can find one. Yeah. Those are the essentials for today. Let's dive a little deeper into an ongoing story. We have an important follow-up today.

Last month, Dr. Nikki explained how the U.S. federal funding works and what changes are happening with the new administration. There have been more changes, so Tom sat down to talk with her about what's changed.

Dr. Nikki, thank you for going through all of this very much. I'll tell you, it was a long list and I definitely didn't catch everything. There is a lot going on. So sorry if your specifically affected area didn't get covered. I used a lot of my sources from sciences. They call it a Trump tracker that's on the news section of their website. So I'd recommend that. Science.org, they've got that.

i don't know if it's science.com science the journal science the journal okay that's all we need to know thanks so yeah right now we're doing a monthly update update it might have to become a bi-weekly update who knows but uh but yeah let's dive in uh you've probably heard about a lot of the federal firings that have been going on so nih nsf cdc noaa and a lot more

And I have some reports from early February and February. It's kind of mixed together. But on February 14th, about one tenth of the employees at CDC, the Center for Disease Control, were fired. That's about a thousand three hundred people overworked.

Over a thousand of NIH, the National Institutes of Health employees were also let go. About 170 employees at NSF, the National Science Foundation, were fired. But as of yesterday or as of March 5th, about half of them are being rehired.

Between 600 to 900 NOAA employees were terminated at the end of February. Don't have the full numbers on that yet because it's still ongoing. Overall, the approximation is that about 6,000 federal workers have been terminated from NSF, NIH, CDC, FDA, and other health and human services.

So. Okay. And it's possible we might see more of them get rehired, but at this point, just the one bit that we've heard of. Yeah. So just NSF, I think for now, although people are saying potentially with NOAA, they're getting rehired. I don't really know what the idea is there. Maybe just

Let's eliminate everything and then rehire back. It's a bit of a startup mentality when you're going in tech. Companies do this in technology all the time where they just clean out and then they decide, okay, we need these people. Let's hire them back. Often they have to hire them back at more wages. Except this isn't a startup, Tom. This is the people who are critical to running our government. Yep, yep, yep. So as said the former NIH director to Science Insider, these people are critical to our programs.

I wanted to try and kind of quantify the impact, but this is almost impossible. 6,000 federal workers is really hard to quantify. But I gave you some examples that kind of jumped out at me and that science reported on.

So one example is researchers who are working on the bird flu. Maybe you heard about it. It's highly pathogenic. It's not being very highly covered right now because it's usually covered by the CDC. And a lot of people working on it got fired. And the CDC has kind of stopped reporting on updates on that on their website as of right now.

I would like to know. And that's related to the price of eggs. Yeah. If you're wondering about eggs, it's because a lot of birds are either being culled or dying from bird flu. And I'm just going to keep going. I can't even report on how much that's a problem because there's so many more things going on. Yeah, sure. So this is at the National Bio and Agro Security Facility, by the way.

The CDC also had to cancel the annual meeting where vaccine researchers discuss vaccine dissemination. So that goes from things of which strains are the flu are we going to vaccinate you against this year to should we put out vaccines on meningitis and chikungunya or sleeping disease? Another huge deal. And I'm just going to keep moving on.

Another example, and this one is like a smaller cute one, but also makes me sad. NSF hires about 40 scientists every year to monitor the population of the endangered Northern spotted owl. This can no longer continue as of right now, unless they rehire these people. And so that's like a cutesy small one, but just to show you the vast span of things that are getting impacted. - The range of different things. Yeah, yeah. - Exactly. - From you,

Your flu vaccine that you will get in the fall, not being discussed, is being affected to, you know, if you care about the northern spotted owl. Yeah, whatever you care about, you can find something that is impacted by this, is what I would want to say. Or even our internet speed, you know, like I said last time, that's governed by, you know, something that got invented by NSF. But wait, there's...

Right. There's more. So you've heard potentially about the foreign aid freeze. That's about two billion dollars. So the U.S. spends money on what we call foreign aid, but it's U.S.-based research that's happening abroad.

One example here is work on global famine relief and malnutrition that's being done at experimental research stations in Africa. So they have, let's say, different crop fields where they're trying different types of seeds that are resistant to drought. And that got shot down. Yeah. And a lot of people, when they think of foreign aid, they think of poverty relief or hunger relief, which it does. But some of it is basic science to further the cause of

hunger relief and things like that. - Yeah, and guess what? We have poverty and hunger too, so we need that research as well. - Sure, absolutely, yeah. - Okay, this one gets a little bit more complicated for, I'm gonna talk about grants, and it builds on what we discussed last month about how does federal funding work, so I encourage you to go back to that.

And we're going to clip these out and make them a series somehow on social media somewhere, if that helps. Yeah, follow Nikki's accounts and DTNS accounts. We'll have them there somewhere. So first of all, all these firings obviously make it complicated to handle grants. It's a lot of paperwork. I have personally contributed to a ton of that paperwork. So you need people to handle that. But we also have things that are a little bit more complex. So you probably don't know about the Federal Register Act.

For NIH, this is the place where you tell the government, I want to look at new grants and discuss them on this date. This Federal Register got frozen at the beginning of this year, so nobody was allowed to schedule times to meet and review new grants. So up till about the end of February, there were no new dates scheduled, and now recently,

about 50 out of 120 that should be happening are taking place as far as we can tell. But it's really word to mouth because it's like I hear we hear about it from colleagues who have attended these meetings, but it's not necessarily being quite reported on. What does that mean every year?

Many, many grants are submitted to NIH and NSF, billions of dollars worth of grants. And that can go from, you know, how do shrimp reproduce to how do we fund a study or how do we fund a cancer trial? It's a very broad, vast array of things. Usually we fund, depending on NSF and NIH,

$500 million to a billion dollars of grants a year, traditionally. This year, at least for NIH right now from the numbers, again, this is data that's usually publicly available. Some of those websites are down right now, but from what we could pull last week, about $200 million has been given right now out of the $500 million that was given in 2021, for example.

And a lot of these are just renewals of awards that got funded last year, and they renew for five years, depending on the grant. So it's slowing down. Even if a grant is not going to be canceled, it's slowing down the awarding of it.

It's a combination of it's slowing down. Some of them are not even being addressed at all and being ignored. And I'm going to talk about that. And then even those and some of this is rumor, some of this is true. But even those that are being funded, I think this morning on March 6th, they were discussed pulling the money back. So this is congressionally at least not allowed as far as we know. Even the freezes congressionally needs to be approved.

but money that has already been funded is now being potentially taken back, although this was kind of like a tweet statement and not an official statement. So we don't know for sure. Okay. Right. As usual. So when I'm giving the example of things that are maybe being held back or not being discussed or funded at all, a lot of these are things like trainee grants, because those grants tend to rely on vocabulary like

diversity mechanisms. We want to try and encourage young, early career, diverse scientists to join the field. And so there are grants specifically for that. And those kind of disappeared. I've suffered from this personally. I have students in my class who applied to this and then went to check on the status and the website for that grant that they

maybe would have got to get a postdoc or to do grad studies doesn't exist anymore. - So a lot of like just lack of information in addition to changes. - Yeah, I'm trying to distill this down to what we have, but what we don't have could fill 10 DTNS episodes. - Certainly.

A lot of like some of this, what I'm getting covered is by scientists who are just on blue sky reporting on data that's provided by the NSF. So I want to call out David Miller or Dr. Miller, who's done a great job covering this. And if you wanted to follow that, I would go there. Oh, and I did have one more point that I forgot to bring up. We talked last time about indirect costs and how.

Putting a block on that would affect grants. As of March 6th, a judge blocked the indirect cost cut, which would be about $4 billion annually. We'll see where that progresses. And I want to note- So stopping the government from cutting that cost. Correct. Thank you for clarifying. Yeah. So for example, if you had indirects of 50, the government wanted to bring it 50%. Government wanted to bring it down to 15%. As of right now, that seems to be blocked by a federal judge. Okay.

I will note that all of these things that I've said so far has caused some universities to pause graduate admissions, mostly in biomedical science. That's because a lot of these rely on federal funding. So if those universities aren't getting federal funding, they can't bring in new students. For sure, we know about Vanderbilt, University of Pennsylvania. Others are slowing down like you, Missouri. Others have hiring freeze like Cornell and many, many more that are having variations of this. So if you were planning on going to med school or grad school, that's affecting you.

So I mentioned there's some words that are causing grants to get pulled. And this is our final bullet point for today.

Have you heard about this, Tom? Yeah. Well, from you, first of all, and then I've started to see murmurings out there. And it's, again, hard to tell, like, what's a rumor that people are throwing around? What's, like, confusion and what's actually happening? So I'm glad you're able to tell me the difference between those. Yeah. So this is something that's been building up over a few months. So I'm going to try and walk you through it. Okay. Okay.

In October of 2024, Senator Ted Cruz issued a Senate report about, I think, the commission of DEI and words that he and his team linked to things that were, quote unquote, like wasteful DEI initiatives in science. There's about a thousand words. And again, this was in October 2024.

Recently, I want to say last month, he also put out a statement and I want to read this just so that you know that this is a Senate document. And here's the words that they use. 3,400 grants totaling more than $2.05 billion.

in federal funding awarded by the National Science Foundation during the Biden-Harris administration were targeted. This funding was diverted towards questionable projects that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.

They are claiming based on what they're saying is we are going to look for words that indicate that federal funding was going towards that type of problem. Correct. So they based this on that big list of words from October, which is over a thousand. Again, three thousand four hundred grants, including one of mine. So I found out about this because I'm on the list with some of my colleagues. I'm not affected because my grant money was already spent at that point. The word that I used was underrepresented grants.

researchers that got me flagged. But I put together a shorter list of about 100 words that Dr. Saxby tweeted out and kind of found based on the grants that were in there that these seem to be the words that were getting things pulled. I want to precise that they did not state exactly what they were doing with this. But talking to colleagues who are on this list, so far funding from those grants has been paused.

And this is things like salaries. So a colleague of mine has got eight people on salary from one of these grants, a $3 million NSF grant that is on pause because it is, you know, quoted as, as I mentioned, DEI or...

So they're looking for these words. And one of the concerns is they're not looking always at the context when they pause the funding. Yeah, it's clearly like a control F search. If you say a diversity of mice, that's going to get flagged and paused as well as a diversity of humans. Absolutely. And there's words you'll see in this list like barrier. And for example, my research, I work on the blood brain barrier or brain trauma. The word trauma is flagged and they will just control F search.

find the list that has that words and that is on that list. And it's an Excel sheet that you can access through the Senate right now. Well, Dr. Dickey, thank you for summarizing what is an incredibly complex and fast moving situation for us again. I know you wanted to finish our update today with those words so people can get an idea of not only what they are, but how many of them there are.

Yeah, I've got about 100 here that I kind of narrowed down because some of them are like pluralized, but I'm going to try my best to read them quickly and you guys can speed it up and just give a new idea of what's going on. All right. Okay, let's go.

Activism, activist, advocacy, advocate, barrier, biased, BIPOC, black and Latinx, community, diversity, community, equity, cultural differences, cultural heritage, culturally responsive, disability, discrimination, discriminatory, diverse backgrounds, diverse communities, diverse group, diversify, diversity and inclusion, diversity, equity, equal opportunity, equality, equitable, equity, ethnicity, excluded, female, fostering, gender, gender diversity, hate speech, excluded, Hispanic minority, historically, implicit bias, inclusion, inclusive, inclusiveness, increased diversity, indigenous community, inequality, inequitable, inequities, institutional, LGBT, marginalized, minority, multicultural, polarization,

victim and women. If you have feedback about anything that gets brought up on the show, one place you can talk to us is on social networks. We are at DTNS show. Look for us on X, Instagram, Threads, Blue Sky, and Mastodon at DTNS show. If you're looking for us on TikTok or YouTube, you can find us at Daily Tech News Show.

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Get 20% off your first Manny system with code PerfectManny20 at OliveandJune.com slash PerfectManny20. That's code PerfectManny20 for 20% off at OliveandJune.com slash PerfectManny20. We end every episode of DTNS with some shared wisdom. Today, Ian has a gentle correction. Yeah, big thanks to Ian for this. He wrote, just an FYI, you

You kept saying the journal that published the red-blue-light acne study was JAMA Dermatol. That's just the abbreviation used to cite the article. It is JAMA Dermatology. I'm sorry that I'm sending you a well, actually, but with the new format, I heard you say it several times yesterday, and it just stuck out to me. Keep up the great work. Long-time listener, multiple-time pain-in-the-neck commenter, Ian. You are not a pain-in-the-neck at all, Ian. Thank you for pointing this out. I went back and looked

at the the journal article that we linked to and it says dermatology all over it but i was just looking at that one place where they called it jama dermatol and then of course now that i think about it i'm like well yeah why why would it be dermatol and not dermatology so uh thank you ian for for phrasing it very kindly as well appreciate that

Big thanks to Dr. Nikki and Ian for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for The Daily Tech News Show. It is made possible by our patrons at patreon.com slash DTNS. Don't forget DTNS Live. That's where you heard me say jam a dermatol multiple times. You can watch us live on YouTube and Twitch. You can find out more about that at dailytechnewsshow.com. Talk to you all tomorrow. The DTNS family of podcasts.

Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

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