Burton Richter, a Nobel Prize–winning particle physicist who also exercised significant influence in scientific policy, died on 18 July, the laboratory announced yesterday. He was 87 years old. In 1974, Richter’s key scientific discovery laid a cornerstone for physicists’ standard model of fundamental particles and forces. In later years, he played an important role in U.S. science policy, including a restructuring of the Department of Energy that elevated its scientific efforts.

“The thing about Burt is that he never went out and said, ‘This is what I did,’” says Michael Lubell, a physicist at City College of New York and a former lobbyist with the American Physical Society (APS) in Washington, D.C. “He was content with the outcome.”

Richter won nearly instant scientific fame in 1974 when he and his team at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (now SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory) in Menlo Park, California, smashed together high-energy electrons and positrons to produce a new particle which they dubbed the ψ. The discovery was key because the ψ turned out to be made of a particle called the charm quark and its antimatter partner. At essentially the same time, a team at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, discovered the same particle, which they called the J. The particle is still called the J/ψ.

Originally published by E&E News

The Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA Fisheries today unveiled what some bill as the most significant changes to Endangered Species Act regulations in several decades.

Consultations with other agencies would be streamlined. There would be a tighter definition of "foreseeable future," crucial in ESA decisions. Critical habitats could shrink, and threatened species would no longer automatically receive the same protections as endangered species.

Barely 3 years after arriving in the United States from Mexico at the age of 13, Gabriela González was facing a precarious future. She had moved out of her mother’s house in Bellingham, Washington, and was living on her own while attending high school. Her grades were good and she wanted to continue her education, but college seemed out of reach.

“Have you ever thought about engineering?” the youth minister at her church asked her.

“Will it pay for college?” she answered.

SHANGHAI, CHINA—Frustrated with a string of unexplained U.S. visa denials, a top Chinese brain scientist has decided to go public, copying numerous journalists on a 17 July email to officials at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing pleading his case.

"Most embassies try to make more friends for their countries; the U.S. embassy is not afraid of offending people and making enemies," says Rao Yi, a high-profile neuroscientist at Peking University in Beijing who studied and worked in the United States for 22 years. His difficulty obtaining a visa is particularly ironic, given that he has been invited to attend a workshop by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), a government agency based in Alexandria, Virginia.

Rao, 56, earned his Ph.D. in neuroscience in 1991 from University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and did a postdoc at Harvard University. He was on the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri for 10 years and later joined Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois, where he rose to be a full professor. Along the way, he acquired U.S. citizenship. He returned to China in 2007 to become dean of Peking University's School of Life Sciences. He later gave up his U.S. citizenship.

Originally published by E&E News

An entomologist with a corporate background is President Donald Trump's pick to head research programs at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Trump intends to nominate Scott Hutchins, global leader of integrated field sciences for Corteva Agriscience, for undersecretary of Agriculture for research, education and economics, the White House said yesterday.

Today, Hungary’s parliament approved an amendment that makes it legally possible to transfer a large part of the budget of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) in Budapest to the country’s newly established Ministry of Innovation and Technology (ITM). The vote is the first step in a process that may bring almost €88 million of MTA’s €124 million annual budget under direct control of ITM; the next step is a parliamentary vote on the science budget itself on Friday. The government’s proposal is widely expected to pass.

Minister for Innovation and Technology László Palkovics has said the transfer will unite Hungary’s innovation and science policy and end fragmentation of research budgets. But many scientists see the move as a power grab by an increasingly authoritarian regime that would extend political influence over science spending and research agendas.

Last week, ScienceInsider talked to MTA President László Lovász, who has negotiated at length with Palkovics in search of a last-minute compromise. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

A pair of proposed hydroelectric dams that will encroach on the habitats of critically endangered primates—in Guinea and Indonesia—are receiving fierce criticism from conservation groups, who fault what they call inadequate scientific review of the harmful effects of these big infrastructure projects.

The government of Guinea was finalizing plans last week for the construction of a 294-megawatt hydroelectric dam in the country’s Moyen Bafing National Park, which wildlife experts say could lead to the loss of up to 1500 critically endangered western chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus), a subspecies whose population has fallen by more than 80% over the past 20 years. Guinea created the national park only this year as a refuge for an estimated 4000 chimpanzees.

A dam planned for Sumatra in Indonesia faces similar criticism; constructing the roads, tunnels, and power lines necessary to service the dam would deforest the habitat of the Tapanuli orangutan subspecies (Pongo tapanuliensis), discovered only last year, which has a remaining population of just 800 apes.

A new report finds no evidence that efforts to provide support for the chronically homeless improve their health or reduce the cost of their care. But that doesn’t mean the U.S. government should stop funding programs that offer permanent supportive housing (PSH), say the authors of the study, conducted by a panel convened by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Instead, the report calls for more analyses of what types of interventions work best for which populations.

“As a former clinician and public health official it would seem logical, if not obvious, that if you can keep people safe with housing they should have better health outcomes,” says the report’s chair, Kenneth Kizer, who leads the Institute for Population Health Improvement at the University of California, Davis. “Indeed, one of our recommendations is that we need to increase the supply of permanent supportive housing.”

The chronically homeless represent less than 20% of the 550,000 homeless people in the United States. But that group tends to require more social and medical services than those with even occasional access to safe and stable housing environments do.

Since it was first funded in 2009, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) in Washington, D.C., a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) program aimed at using government funding to push promising technologies from the laboratory into the marketplace, has been headed by scientists bearing doctorates in fields such as chemistry and engineering. Now, President Donald Trump’s administration wants a lawyer and energy investor to take over.

This week, the White House announced that Trump intends to nominate S. Lane Genatowski, a Houston, Texas–based investment adviser, to be ARPA-E’s next director. If confirmed by the Senate, he would become ARPA-E’s third director. (It has had several interim leaders.)

The 10 July announcement is prompting questions about the direction ARPA-E will take under Trump—and whether someone with Genatowski’s experience is equipped to lead a small, tight-knit agency where discussions can touch on the latest developments in fields as diverse as nuclear fusion and batteries.

Got an idea that could transform the world? The National Science Foundation (NSF) is all ears.

The $7.8 billion research agency in Alexandria, Virginia, already gets way more good research proposals from scientists than it can fund. But NSF officials worry they still might be missing something important. So this fall they will give the public a chance to win glory—and some money—in a contest dubbed The NSF 2026 Idea Machine.

“We don’t want [the idea] to be something NSF is already doing,” says Suzi Iacono, head of NSF’s Office of Integrative Activities. “We want it to be exciting, and original, and important in terms of the potential benefits to science and to society.”