A coalition of academic and business groups is fighting for more funding for research and industrial innovation in Brazil. The legislation that they are backing, which would more than double the core Brazilian science and innovation budget for 2020, sailed through the Senate on 13 August with a near-unanimous vote. But it still needs to clear the lower house of the country’s National Congress and survive a potential veto from President Jair Bolsonaro, who has sought steep cuts to science budgets.
Those in support of the legislation argue that years of slashing science funding have made it difficult to respond to the COVID-19 crisis in Brazil, and that extra money could bolster efforts to better diagnose and treat the disease. The proposal would add 4.6 billion reais (US$820 million) to Brazil’s core science accounts, and, more importantly, would secure a permanent financial source for science that would be protected from Bolsonaro’s administration and future ones.
“What happened in the Senate was amazing,” says Luiz Davidovich, president of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. He says the next vote could take place in the coming weeks.
A SARS-CoV-2 mutation that appeared in East Asia early in the pandemic is linked to symptoms milder than those caused by the unmutated version of the virus.
In early 2020, researchers in Singapore identified a cluster of COVID-19 cases caused by a SARS-CoV-2 variant missing a chunk of DNA that spanned two genes, ORF7b and ORF8. To determine the consequences of this change, called a deletion, Lisa Ng at the Singapore Immunology Network and colleagues compared people infected with viruses carrying the deletion with those infected by normal viruses (B. E. Young et al. Lancet http://doi.org/d6x7; 2020).
None of the 29 people whose viruses had the mutation needed supplemental oxygen, but 26 of the 92 people whose viruses lacked the mutation did. Viruses carrying the deletion haven’t been detected since March — possibly owing to infection-control measures.
The virus responsible for the 2002–04 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) acquired a similar deletion in the ORF8 gene, suggesting that this might be an important adaptation to infecting humans, the authors say.
The use of acronyms in biomedical research papers has increased steadily over the past 70 years, a study of millions of scholarly articles has found.
The analysis, which included more than 24 million titles and 18 million abstracts of papers published between 1950 and 2019, identified 1.1 million unique acronyms that have been used in biomedical research (A. Barnett and Z. Doubleday eLife 9, e60080; 2020). Unsurprisingly, DNA was found to be the most widely used acronym, appearing more than 2.4 million times.
In 73% of abstracts, the researchers found at least one acronym. But relatively few have stuck: just 0.2% of all the acronyms have been used regularly, and their popularity has changed over time. In the 1950s, the most commonly used acronym was ACTH, which stands for adrenocorticotropic hormone, a molecule produced in the brain. Over the years, increasing numbers of papers mentioned DNA, RNA and HIV.
Although acronyms such as DNA have become widely understood, many others do not have immediately obvious meanings, says study co-author Adrian Barnett, a statistician at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. “Science needs to be clear and understandable by the public and policymakers,” he says. “But we’re travelling in the wrong direction.”
Nature 584, 501 (2020)
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