Globally, the average person wastes around 132 kg of food per year, and this number is rising. Wealthy countries waste more food per person, but in an opinion paper publishing September 26 in the Cell Press journal Cell Reports Sustainability, agricultural economists highlight how urbanization and economic expansion are driving increases in food waste in lower- and middle-income countries. Curbing food waste will require policy and structural initiatives, they argue, such as incentivizing supermarkets and restaurants to donate food and educating consumers to promote smarter purchasing and better food storage practices. 

Parents worry for their children’s future but many struggle to live low-carbon lives. A new study finds barriers stopping parents from going green.

Researchers recently interviewed 20 forestry professionals in the Southwest to understand what the field has to gain—and lose—with artificial intelligence. While the forestry professionals agree AI could help them save time on monotonous tasks, they worry it could also use inaccurate data to influence policy decisions. 

The Routledge Handbook of Information History, released last month by Routledge, examines how society, politics, culture, and technology have shaped information practices over millennia. The 638-page volume co-edited by Professor Emeritus Alistair Black and Associate Professor Bonnie Mak (School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Toni Weller (De Montfort University), and Laura Skouvig (University of Copenhagen)  features more than forty contributors from around the world.

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.

Over 50 percent of small-molecule drug patents this century cite at least one piece of NIH-backed research that would likely have been vulnerable to the type of funding cuts currently proposed by the administration, according to a new study.