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The Top 10 Funniest Sitcom Episodes of All Time, Ranked!

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The Top 10 Funniest Sitcom Episodes of All Time, Ranked!



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Funniest Sitcom Episodes: Top 10 of All Time, Ranked! | Woman’s World






























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Eleanor Maguire, Memory Expert Who Studied London Cabbies, Dies at 54

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Eleanor Maguire, Memory Expert Who Studied London Cabbies, Dies at 54

Eleanor Maguire, a cognitive neuroscientist whose research on the human hippocampus — especially those belonging to London taxi drivers — transformed the understanding of memory, revealing that a key structure in the brain can be strengthened like a muscle, died on Jan. 4 in London. She was 54.

Her death, at a hospice facility, was confirmed by Cathy Price, her colleague at the U.C.L. Queen Square Institute of Neurology. Dr. Maguire was diagnosed with spinal cancer in 2022 and had recently developed pneumonia.

Working for 30 years in a small, tight-knit lab, Dr. Maguire obsessed over the hippocampus — a seahorse-shaped engine of memory deep in the brain — like a meticulous, relentless detective trying to solve a cold case.

An early pioneer of using functional magnetic resonance imaging (f.M.R.I.) on living subjects, Dr. Maguire was able to look inside human brains as they processed information. Her studies revealed that the hippocampus can grow, and that memory is not a replay of the past but rather an active reconstructive process that shapes how people imagine the future.

“She was absolutely one of the leading researchers of her generation in the world on memory,” Chris Frith, an emeritus professor of neuropsychology at University College London, said in an interview. “She changed our understanding of memory, and I think she also gave us important new ways of studying it.”

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In 1995, while she was a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Frith’s lab, she was watching television one evening when she stumbled on “The Knowledge,” a quirky film about prospective London taxi drivers memorizing the city’s 25,000 streets to prepare for a three-year-long series of licensing tests.

Dr. Maguire, who said she rarely drove because she feared never arriving at her destination, was mesmerized. “I am absolutely appalling at finding my way around,” she once told The Daily Telegraph. “I wondered, ‘How are some people so bloody good and I am so terrible?’”

In the first of a series of studies, Dr. Maguire and her colleagues scanned the brains of taxi drivers while quizzing them about the shortest routes between various destinations in London.

The results, published in 1997, showed that blood flow in the right hippocampus increased sharply as the drivers described their routes — meaning that specific area of the brain played a key role in spatial navigation.

But that didn’t solve the mystery of why the taxi drivers were so good at their jobs.

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Dr. Maguire kept digging. Using M.R.I. machines, she measured different regions in the brains of 16 drivers, comparing their dimensions with those in the brains of people who weren’t taxi drivers.

“The posterior hippocampi of taxi drivers were significantly larger relative to those of control subjects,” she wrote in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And the size, she found, correlated with the length of a cabby’s career: The longer the cabby had driven, the bigger the hippocampus.

Dr. Maguire’s study, published in March 2000, generated headlines around the world and turned London taxi drivers into unlikely scientific stars.

“I never noticed part of my brain growing,” David Cohen, a member of the London Cab Drivers Club, told the BBC. “It makes you wonder what happened to the rest of it.”

Dr. Maguire wondered, too: Why (and how) did their hippocampi grow?

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She followed up with other studies. One showed that the hippocampi of bus drivers — whose routes were set rather than navigated from memory — didn’t grow. Another showed that prospective taxi drivers who failed their tests did not gain any hippocampus volume in the process.

The implications were striking: The key structure in the brain governing memory and spatial navigation was malleable.

In a roundabout way, Dr. Maguire’s findings revealed the scientific underpinnings of the ancient Roman “method of loci,” a memorization trick also known as the “memory palace.”

This technique involves visualizing a large house and assigning an individual memory to a particular room. Mentally walking through the house fires up the hippocampus, eliciting the memorized information. Dr. Maguire studied memory athletes — people who train their brains to memorize vast amounts of information quickly — who used this method, and observed that its effectiveness was “reflected in its continued use over two and a half millennia in virtually unchanged form.”

But recalling information was only half the story.

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In studying patients with damage to the hippocampus, including those with amnesia, Dr. Maguire found that they couldn’t visualize or navigate future scenarios. One taxi driver, for instance, struggled to make his way through busy London streets in a virtual-reality simulation. Other amnesiacs couldn’t imagine an upcoming Christmas party or a trip to the beach.

“Instead of visualizing a single scene in their mind, such as a crowded beach filled with sunbathers, the patients reported seeing just a collection of disjointed images, such as sand, water, people and beach towels,” the journal Science News reported in 2009.

The hippocampus, it turns out, binds snippets of information to construct scenes from the past — and the future.

“The whole point of the brain is future planning,” Dr. Maguire was quoted as saying in Margaret Heffernan’s book “Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future” (2020). “You need to survive and think about what happened when I was last here, is there a scary monster that will come out and eat me? We create models of the future by recruiting our memories of the past.”

Eleanor Anne Maguire was born on March 27, 1970, in Dublin. Her father, Paddy Maguire, was a factory worker. Her mother, Anne Maguire, was a receptionist.

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Growing up, Eleanor was obsessed with “Star Trek.”

“My first scientific hero was fictional — Spock, science officer on the Starship Enterprise,” she told the journal Current Biology in 2012. “He embodied so much of what attracted me to science. He was inquisitive, logical, honest, meticulous, calm, fearless in facing the unknown, innovative and unafraid of taking risks.”

She graduated from University College Dublin in 1990 with a degree in psychology, and returned to earn her doctorate there after receiving a master’s degree from the University College of Swansea (now Swansea University).

Dr. Maguire joined the faculty at University College London in 1995 and never left.

She is survived by her parents. Her brother, Declan, died in 2019, also of cancer.

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At Dr. Maguire’s memorial service, Dr. Price spoke about the energy and excitement her friend and longtime colleague generated at the lab, recalling that Dr. Maguire’s mother had called nightly to remind her daughter to go home.

“It wasn’t just a job,” Dr. Price said. “It consumed us, day and night.”

There was a sense that they were onto something big.

“We were among the first to use cutting-edge technology to peer inside the healthy, living human brain and witness its functions in action,” Dr. Price said. “It was an exhilarating and transformative time in neuroscience, and Eleanor’s curiosity and creativity were instrumental to numerous discoveries.”

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Bird flu found in Arizona dairy cattle milk after being first detected in neighboring Nevada

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Bird flu found in Arizona dairy cattle milk after being first detected in neighboring Nevada

The Arizona Department of Agriculture (AZDA) recently confirmed the first bird flu genotype D1.1 detection in milk from a dairy herd in Maricopa County.

As a protective measure, the dairy farm is under quarantine, according to a statement from the AZDA. 

Although the cattle are asymptomatic, testing confirmed the diagnosis.

The highly contagious bird flu has been confirmed in dairy cows. (Getty Images)

BIRD FLU UPTICK IN US HAS CDC ON ALERT FOR PANDEMIC ‘RED FLAGS’: REPORT

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“Every dairy in Arizona has been tested at least once since January. Thus far, only a sample from this dairy has tested positive,” officials said. “Milk and other dairy products that have been pasteurized are safe to consume.”

The USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) first confirmed the virus, genotype D1.1, was found in Nevada dairy cattle Jan. 31.

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A medical technologist in a molecular diagnostic lab extracts DNA from milk samples for testing at the Animal Health Diagnostic Center at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

BIRD FLU PATIENT HAD VIRUS MUTATIONS, SPARKING CONCERN OF HUMAN SPREAD

All previous detections in dairy cattle were a different genotype, B3.13. 

Genotype D1.1 represents the predominant genotype in the North American flyways over the fall and winter and has been identified in wild birds, mammals and spillovers into domestic poultry, according to APHIS.

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Lab at cornell

HDC receiving staff prep arriving milk samples for testing at the Animal Health Diagnostic Center at Cornell University Dec. 10, 2024, in Ithaca, N.Y. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

The AZDA said the genotype “bears no features that would make it more likely to infect humans,” according to the statement.

However, the new bird flu strain, D1.1, has been reported in more than a dozen humans exposed to infected poultry.

The CDC noted on its website that bird flu’s risk to the public remains low.

FOX 10 Phoenix contributed to this report.

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How Trump’s Medical Research Cuts Would Hit Colleges and Hospitals in Every State

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How Trump’s Medical Research Cuts Would Hit Colleges and Hospitals in Every State

A proposal by the Trump administration to reduce the size of grants for institutions conducting medical research would have far-reaching effects, and not just for elite universities and the coastal states where many are located.

Also at risk could be grants from the National Institutes of Health to numerous hospitals that conduct clinical research on major diseases, and to state universities across the country. North Carolina, Missouri and Pennsylvania could face disproportionate losses, because of the concentration of medical research in those states.

N.I.H. funding in 2024

Per capita
|
Total

Based on spending in the 2024 fiscal year.

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In the 2024 fiscal year, the N.I.H. spent at least $32 billion on nearly 60,000 grants, including medical research in areas like cancer, genetics and infectious disease. Of that, $23 billion went to “direct” research costs, such as microscopes and researchers’ salaries, according to an Upshot analysis of N.I.H. grant data.

The other $9 billion went to the institutions’ overhead, or “indirect costs,” which can include laboratory upkeep, utility bills, administrative staff and access to hazardous materials disposal, all of which research institutions say is essential to making research possible.

The N.I.H. proposal, which has been put on hold by a federal court, aims to reduce funding for those indirect costs to a set 15 percent rate that the administration says would save about $4 billion a year. The Upshot analysis estimates that a 15 percent rate would have reduced funding for the grants that received N.I.H. support in 2024 by at least $5 billion. The White House said the savings would be reinvested in more research, but the rate cuts would open up sizable budget holes in most projects at research institutions.

It is not clear whether those organizations can fill the gaps with other funding sources or by shifting how they apply for grants. Instead, many officials at universities and hospitals have said that they may have to pull back on medical or scientific research.

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“It’s not an overstatement to say that a slash this drastic in total research funding slows research,” said Heather Pierce, senior director for science policy at the Association of American Medical Colleges, which has sued along with other education and hospital associations to block the policy. And slower scientific progress, she said, would affect anyone who depends on the development of new treatments, medical interventions and diagnostic tools.

We estimate that virtually all universities and hospitals would see fewer funds on similar projects in the future. The 10 institutions that receive the most money from N.I.H. stand to lose more than $100 million per year on average.

To understand how the change would work, let’s look at one grant for about $600,000 sent last year to the University of Alabama at Birmingham to study whether exercise can improve memory for people with epilepsy.

The N.I.H. sent the university this funding in the 2024 fiscal year, as part of a multiyear grant.

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A majority of the money went to direct costs associated with the study.

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And an additional 45 percent went to indirect costs supporting the research, like building maintenance and administrative staff.

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Under the new rules, the university would receive a 15 percent rate on such grants, bringing the total down.

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That would have been a funding loss of nearly $130,000 on this project alone.

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The calculation above, which we have repeated for every grant paid last year, is a bit simplified. In reality, the researchers would lose even more money than we’ve shown, because of the way indirect funding is calculated (see our methodology at the bottom of this article).

Our analysis also makes some other conservative assumptions given the policy’s uncertainty. We assume, for instance, that the new 15 percent rate is a flat rate that all grantees would receive, and not a maximum rate (a distinction left unclear in the N.I.H. guidance). We also assume that the change applies not just to institutions of higher education, but also to all kinds of grantees, including hospitals.

In a statement, the White House indicated it would reserve any savings for additional research grants. “Contrary to the hysteria, redirecting billions of allocated N.I.H. spending away from administrative bloat means there will be more money and resources available for legitimate scientific research, not less,” said Kush Desai, a White House spokesman.

The N.I.H. announcement, however, coincides with the Trump administration’s moves to cut spending across the government, and with the N.I.H.’s withholding of funding for grants — their direct and indirect costs alike — in apparent conflict with separate court orders.

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The N.I.H. guidance document includes a number of conflicting statements and statistics the Upshot could not reconcile. The N.I.H. also declined to answer questions about the policy and about its public-facing data tracking grant spending.

The N.I.H. since 1950 has provided these overhead funds in a formulaic way, and since 1965, the government has used a rate individually calculated for each institution. Federal officials review cost summaries, floor plans and other information to determine that rate. That number can be higher for institutions in more expensive parts of the country, or for those that use more energy-intensive equipment. The proposal from the Trump administration would set aside those differences in standardizing the rate at 15 percent for every grantee.

The lists below estimate what would have happened to the 10 universities and hospitals that received the most N.I.H. grant money in the 2024 fiscal year, if the formula change had been in effect then.

Largest N.I.H. grant recipients among colleges, universities and medical schools

Name Total ’24 Funding Estimated reduction

University of California, San Francisco

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San Francisco

$793 mil. $121 mil.

Johns Hopkins University

Baltimore

$788 mil. $136 mil.

Washington University

St. Louis

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$717 mil. $108 mil.

University of Michigan

Ann Arbor, Mich.

$708 mil. $119 mil.

University of Pennsylvania

Philadelphia

$652 mil. $129 mil.

University of Pittsburgh

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Pittsburgh, Pa.

$632 mil. $115 mil.

Columbia University Health Sciences

New York

$611 mil. $111 mil.

Yale University

New Haven, Conn.

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$602 mil. $131 mil.

Stanford University

Stanford, Calif.

$584 mil. $107 mil.

University of Washington

Seattle

$542 mil. $86 mil.

Source: National Institutes of Health

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Based on spending in the 2024 fiscal year.

Largest N.I.H. grant recipients among hospitals

Name Total ’24 Funding Estimated reduction

Massachusetts General Hospital

Boston

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$641 mil. $98 mil.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Nashville

$468 mil. $71 mil.

Brigham and Women’s Hospital

Boston

$364 mil. $77 mil.

Boston Children’s Hospital

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Boston

$218 mil. $54 mil.

University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

Houston

$180 mil. $39 mil.

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

Philadelphia

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$162 mil. $32 mil.

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Boston

$161 mil. $35 mil.

Cincinnati Childrens Hospital Medical Center

Cincinnati

$153 mil. $28 mil.

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

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Boston

$117 mil. $23 mil.

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center

Los Angeles

$100 mil. $23 mil.

Source: National Institutes of Health

Based on spending in the 2024 fiscal year, which extends from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30.

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If courts allow the change to move forward, some of its consequences are hard to predict.

Advocates for the policy change note that these organizations receive numerous other federal subsidies. Most universities and research hospitals are nonprofits that pay no federal taxes, for example. The N.I.H. announcement also noted that these same institutions often accept grants from charitable foundations that offer much lower overhead rates than the federal government, a signal that universities and hospitals willingly pursue research opportunities with less supplemental funding.

Because the indirect payments are based on broad formulas and not specific line items, critics say institutions may be diverting these federal dollars into unaccountable funds to pay for programs that taxpayers can’t see, such as the kinds of diversity, equity and inclusion programs targeted by the Trump administration.

“That’s how you get things like the ability of administrators to use larger overhead pools of money to build out D.E.I. bureaucracies, or to fund Ph.D. programs in the humanities,” said Jay Greene, a senior research fellow in the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group. Mr. Greene was the coauthor of a 2022 article urging the N.I.H. to cut or eliminate indirect grant funding. But he did not have specific examples to cite of research funds being spent in this way.

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Researchers say the indirect funds have a branding problem, but are a necessary component of research.

“The term ‘indirect costs’ or the alternative term ‘overhead’ sounds dangerously close to ‘slush fund’ to some people,” said Jeremy Berg, who was the director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the N.I.H. from 2003 to 2011. “There are real costs somebody has to pay for, and heating and cooling university laboratory buildings is a real cost.”

Some grant recipients already receive low overhead payments, but a large majority of them currently receive more than 15 percent, meaning they will need to make budgetary changes to absorb the loss. Among the 2024 grants that we analyzed, institutions that received more than $1 million in N.I.H. support got an average of 40 cents of indirect funding for every dollar of direct funding.

Distribution of overhead funding at N.I.H.-funded institutions in 2024

As a share of direct funding

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Source: National Institutes of Health

Calculated for 613 institutions that received at least $1 million in funding in fiscal year 2024. Federally negotiated rates are higher than these.

Universities and hospitals may adjust their overall budgets to keep supporting medical research by cutting back on other things they do. Some might be able to raise money from donors to fill the shortfalls, though most universities are already raising as much philanthropic money as they can.

But many research institutions have said they would adjust by simply doing less medical research, because they would not be able to afford to do as much with less government help.

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Universities and hospitals might also shift the kinds of research they do, avoiding areas that require more lab space, regulatory compliance or high-tech equipment, and focusing on types of research that will require them to provide less overhead funding themselves. That may mean disproportionate reductions in complex areas of research like genetics.

Those effects may be spread unevenly across the research landscape, as some organizations find a way to adjust, while others abandon medical research altogether.

We’ve compiled a list of institutions that received at least $1 million in N.I.H. funding in the 2024 fiscal year, along with our estimates of how much less they would have gotten under the new policy. Most of these institutions are universities or hospitals, but there are also some private companies and nonprofit research groups. Our numbers tend to be underestimates of the cuts.

Institution No. of grants Total ’24 Funding ▼ Estimated change

New York

1,024 $611 mil. -$111 mil.

New York

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596 $480 mil. -$63 mil.

New York

714 $453 mil. -$93 mil.

New York

540 $293 mil. -$55 mil.

New York

331 $197 mil. -$54 mil.

Bronx, N.Y.

311 $184 mil. -$35 mil.

Rochester, N.Y.

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384 $180 mil. -$32 mil.

Ithaca, N.Y.

221 $102 mil. -$21 mil.

Amherst, N.Y.

204 $83 mil. -$13 mil.

New York

195 $76 mil. -$13 mil.

New York

129 $69 mil. -$17 mil.

Stony Brook, N.Y.

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176 $64 mil. -$13 mil.

New York

124 $50 mil. -$9 mil.

Buffalo, N.Y.

77 $48 mil. -$9 mil.

Manhasset, N.Y.

61 $39 mil. -$9 mil.

Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.

78 $34 mil. -$12 mil.

Syracuse, N.Y.

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72 $25 mil. -$5 mil.

New York

49 $24 mil. -$3 mil.

Brooklyn, N.Y.

29 $23 mil. -$2 mil.

Orangeburg, N.Y.

17 $17 mil. -$3 mil.

New York

20 $14 mil. -$3 mil.

Albany, N.Y.

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30 $13 mil. -$3 mil.

Binghamton, N.Y.

38 $13 mil. -$2 mil.

New York

28 $12 mil. -$2 mil.

New York

7 $11 mil. -$3 mil.

Albany, N.Y.

38 $11 mil. -$2 mil.

New York

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13 $11 mil. -$1 mil.

New York

20 $10 mil. -$1 mil.

Syracuse, N.Y.

33 $10 mil. -$2 mil.

New York

25 $10 mil. -$3 mil.

Troy, N.Y.

25 $9 mil. -$1 mil.

New York City, N.Y.

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2 $8 mil. -$1 mil.

New York

2 $8 mil. +$371k

New York

9 $7 mil. -$2 mil.

Albany, N.Y.

7 $6 mil. -$1 mil.

Valhalla, N.Y.

17 $6 mil. -$1 mil.

Mineola, N.Y.

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9 $6 mil. -$1 mil.

Rochester, N.Y.

20 $6 mil. -$759k

White Plains, N.Y.

10 $5 mil. -$1 mil.

Menands, N.Y.

10 $5 mil. -$961k

Flushing, N.Y.

14 $5 mil. -$540k

New York

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9 $5 mil. -$535k

Upton, N.Y.

1 $5 mil. -$1 mil.

New York

3 $4 mil. -$1 mil.

Bronx, N.Y.

10 $3 mil. -$158k

New York

1 $3 mil. +$213k

New York

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1 $3 mil. +$144k

New York

9 $3 mil. -$607k

Queens, N.Y.

15 $3 mil. -$647k

Potsdam, N.Y.

9 $2 mil. -$270k

New York

13 $2 mil. -$313k

Buffalo, N.Y.

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5 $2 mil. -$745k

Utica, N.Y.

4 $2 mil. -$738k

New York

4 $2 mil. -$259k

Niskayuna, N.Y.

3 $2 mil. -$459k

New York

8 $2 mil. -$142k

New York

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6 $1 mil. -$333k

Jamaica, N.Y.

5 $1 mil. -$415k

New York

1 $1 mil. +$113k

New York

3 $1 mil. -$35k

New York

4 $1 mil. -$336k

Old Westbury, N.Y.

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3 $1 mil. -$199k

Clifton Park, N.Y.

3 $1 mil. -$315k

Garrison, N.Y.

2 $1 mil. -$27k

Other

56 $16 mil. -$1 mil.
Total 5,887 $3.3 bil. -$618 mil.

About our analysis

To estimate changes in funding, we relied on data from RePORT, the N.I.H.’s online registry of grants and projects. We limited our analysis to grants listed within the 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia or Puerto Rico. We also limited it to grants where the amount of indirect funding was known and where the combined indirect and direct funding was within five percent of the listed total funding. These filters resulted in removing many grants to private organizations such as domestic for-profits.

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We calculated how much indirect funding each grant would have received under the new guidance by multiplying the listed direct funding amount by 15 percent. We then compared that number to the listed indirect funding amount for each great to estimate the impact of the policy.

There are two reasons our calculations are most likely conservative estimates of true reductions in funding. First, only a portion of the direct funding for each grant is considered to be “eligible” for the purposes of calculating indirect funding. For example, laboratory equipment and graduate student tuition reimbursements are deducted from the direct costs before applying the negotiated overhead rate, whereas our calculations assumed 100 percent of the listed direct costs would be eligible. We performed a more accurate version of our calculations for the 10 universities and 10 hospitals receiving the most N.I.H. funds by inferring their eligible direct costs from their reported negotiated rates. When we did this, we saw an additional increase in losses of about 20 percent.

Second, we applied a 15 percent rate to all grants in the database, including those with an initial indirect rate below 15 percent. An analysis by James Murphy helped inform this approach. According to our analysis, then, some grants would actually receive more money under the new guidance. If the new rate operated more like a cap — and grants with rates currently below 15 percent did not change — the overall reductions in funding would be larger, as the reductions would no longer be offset by some small number of funding increases.

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