Officials appointed by the new president started firing thousands of researchers and other government employees. At the same time, it cut billions of dollars of US support for global-health programmes, including dismantling the US Agency for International Development (USAID). It arrested some scholars from outside the United States as it stepped up efforts to restrict entry into the country and limit political speech. Over the next few months, the US government took steps to exert unprecedented control over universities by withholding federal research funding. The administration cancelled tens of billions of dollars in research grants to universities to force the adoption of policies on hiring and admissions, policing of campuses, curricula and other factors. The administration has justified its actions by saying that they were necessary to improve science and innovation. 'The Trump administration is committed to cutting taxpayer funding of left-wing pet projects that are masquerading as 'scientific research' and restoring the American people's confidence in our scientific and public-health bodies that was lost during the COVID era,' White House spokesperson Kush Desai said in a statement to Nature....
RIP to Facebook Messenger's desktop app. The native app for Mac and Windows is no longer available to users as of today, December 15, 2025, and existing users are being directed to the Facebook website to continue using the popular messaging service. Though originally launched at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Messenger's desktop app couldn't handle as many video call participants as business-focused rivals like Zoom, and didn't offer screensharing or easy-to-share URLs. More recently, the company shifted the technology underpinning the app's desktop version. According to Meta's help documentation, Messenger for Mac was built with Catalyst, which lets developers bring iPad apps to the Mac. That technology has received criticism for both developers and users ' developers cited the extra work required, while users noticed apps' lack of a native feel. The downgrades likely impacted user demand for a standalone Mac app, while the strategy of moving Messenger back to Facebook suggested Meta was attempting to shore up declining usage of its aging flagship social network....
On 8 December 2020, a 90-year-old British woman became the first person in the world to receive a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Five years on, more than 13.64 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered. Thanks to the rapid roll-out of these vaccines, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that COVID-19 was no longer a public health emergency in May 2023. The global response to the COVID-19 pandemic was a turning point for public health ' but the downstream effects haven't all been positive, argues Kristen Panthagani, a physician at Yale New Haven Hospital in Connecticut. In March 2020, Panthagani started a newsletter called You Can Know Things, which originally focused on addressing rumours and myths about COVID-19 vaccines and public-health measures. It now explores how the miscommunication of science and health measures has damaged public trust in vaccines and scientific research. The pandemic was a steep learning curve. Nobody in our generation had ever encountered anything like that before and we must remember what we were dealing with at the time. It's easy to beat ourselves up looking back, but it's important that we look at what we can learn from that time and how we can do better going forwards....
On a video call in early September, Sarah Tabrizi first saw the data that she and other researchers studying Huntington's disease had been chasing for decades: compelling evidence that a gene-targeting therapy could slow the relentless progression of the neurodegenerative brain disorder. Before these results, 'I was beginning to get a little bit worried that maybe, by the time people develop symptoms, that it was going to be too late to treat', says Tabrizi, a neurologist who directs the Huntington's Disease Centre at University College London. But here was powerful validation that the window for treating the rare, hereditary condition remains open ' offering a chance for meaningful, disease-modifying interventions. The first-in-class gene therapy ' called AMT-130 and developed by uniQure, a biotechnology company in Amsterdam ' uses a harmless virus to deliver strands of genetic material into affected brain regions. Once there, the therapy switches off production of the faulty mutant huntingtin protein that slowly destroys brain cells....
