Declining NIH funding was a hot topic apparently at the Society for Neuroscience meeting held last week in Atlanta, according to this article.

NIH heads were there to paint a rather grim picture: grant application success rates were 23 percent last year and that’s expected to drop to 19 percent next year. It’s a sign of bad timing: more researchers entered the field as funding was beginning to drop.

In this lackluster funding environment, Howard Hughes-funded researchers are counting their lucky stars. But they may soon have to do more to keep getting that funding, according to this article. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute could, by next year, adopt a new policy for open access; HHMI investigators’ published papers would only be considered as part of their reappointment application if they were deposited in a public database within 6 months of publication. Researchers have been encouraged to do this voluntarily, but few have. There are lots of reasons why they don’t (some actually don’t believe in open access) so we’ll see whether such stronger measures will work.

Finally, is there a genome they won’t sequence? The latest creature: the honeybee. This article says the bee genome sequence can help us learn more about the genetics of social behavior. What will they sequence next?