Penn State Professor of German and Linguistics Michael Putnam has spent a good part of his career thinking about language attrition, or “language loss,” among bi- and multilingual speakers. Now, it’s the basis of his latest book, “An Introduction to Language Attrition: Linguistic, Social, and Cognitive Perspectives.”

Roughly half of all FDA-approved drugs from 2000 onward rely on publications funded by grants that would have been cut assuming a 40% reduction in U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding in past decades, say authors of a new Policy Forum. In this piece, Pierre Azoulay and colleagues present an analysis of a hypothetical alternative history.  “Assuming that the near term resembles the recent past,” they say, “our analysis indicates that substantial NIH budget cuts – including those implemented at the funding margin – could curtail research linked to a large share of potential drug approvals.” The NIH, historically one of the world’s most consistently supported biomedical research funders, faces unprecedented uncertainty. In 2025, the agency began canceling existing grants and delaying new ones, with funding for competitive grants falling more than 40% below the previous year’s levels. What’s more, the Trump administration’s proposed FY2026 budget calls for a nearly 40% cut in spending.

 

To explore potential impacts of such cuts, Azoulay and colleagues performed a “what-if” scenario analysis to determine how these cuts would impact downstream drug development. Azoulay et al. focused on “at-risk” grants – those that would have likely been cut in a 40% smaller budget from the years 1980 to 2007 – for small-molecule drugs. The authors found that among 557 drugs approved between 2000 and 2023, 40 had at least one patent directly acknowledging NIH extramural funding, and 14 of these were supported by at-risk grants. And, when considering research citations, 331 cite at least one NIH-supported publication, and 286 reference research funded by grants that would have been cut under a hypothetical 40% budget reduction. These findings suggest that a large portion of modern pharmaceuticals rely on publicly funded science, often through indirect pathways that provide critical background knowledge, methods, or foundational research. Moreover, the authors show that the drugs linked to at-risk research are often highly valuable, demonstrating that NIH funding not only underpins a substantial share of medical innovation but also supports drugs that are clinically and economically important.

A digital reconstruction of the nearly one-million-year-old Yunxian 2 cranium from China, which corrected previous distortions inherent in the fossil, suggests it belonged to the Asian Homo longi clade. This means the cranium represents an early branch of the sister lineage to modern humans that may have included the enigmatic Denisovans. Fossil evidence shows that, during the Middle Pleistocene, multiple Homo lineages with diverse physical forms coexisted. Much of what is known about human evolution and archaic hominins relies on fossil skulls. Yet many specimens from this era are damaged and/or deformed, leading to uncertainties concerning species interpretations. For example, the Yunxian crania from China date back nearly a million years and exhibit a mosaic of primitive traits resembling Homo erectus alongside features suggestive of later species, such as Homo sapiens. However, because one of these skulls, Yunxian 2, was highly distorted, its evolutionary position has long been uncertain. Using advanced CT scanning and digital reconstruction techniques, Xiaobo Feng and colleagues corrected the compression and distortions in the Yunxian 2 crania. According to Feng et al., phylogenetic analyses incorporating the reconstructed Yunxian 2 crania revealed a mix of previously unknown primitive and derived traits, suggesting that the fossil belongs to the Asian H.  longi clade – a sister group to Homo sapiens, which likely included the Denisovans. Individuals within the H. longi clade exhibit distinctive traits, including a larger braincase, narrower spacing between the eyes, a more pronounced glabellar depression, and a lower, elongated frontal bone, which are characteristics clearly visible in the Yunxian 2 fossil. The authors also show that Yunxian fossils are likely the oldest within the longi clade, though not the most basal. Given the fossil’s blend of primitive traits from earlier humans and more derived features shared with H. longi and H. sapiens, Feng et al. suggest that the Yunxian group may represent a transitional form, capturing an early phase of rapid diversification within these lineages.

Quality sleep, avoiding tobacco, social support and other healthy habits are linked to slower brain aging.

A new survey by Morning Consult and the nonprofit Physicians Committee finds that in response to current high beef prices, 60% of shoppers are buying less beef or skipping buying beef altogether.