David Matthews

Israeli researchers, some still under rocket fire, have said it was impossible to meet application cut-off points during a state of war. Now the ERC and EIC are pushing back four deadlines for all applicants

Labs in Israel have emptied as reservists are called up and foreign researchers fly home. With some scientists still under Hamas rocket fire, Israeli academics want the European Research Council to push back call deadlines

Voters go to the polls on 22 October, following which wider talks with Brussels should resume. But with the Commission’s precise negotiating preconditions unclear, it’s doubtful whether association to the research programme can be agreed before EU elections next year

European and Japanese scientists will fine tune their scientific models on each other’s machines, hopefully boosting performance and future-proofing code. It’s the latest push from Brussels to create stronger research links with ‘like-minded’ democracies

Kiwi researchers have won four bids so far, although this could create budget headaches for Wellington. New Zealand also wants to collaborate with the EU on sensitive technologies like space and quantum

Roadshows, seed funds, and high-level visits are planned to get EU and UK partners collaborating once again. But UK universities also want an explicit guarantee the country will join the successor programme, FP10

Following criticism of its role in indirectly funding Chinese research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the NIH is demanding foreign collaborators submit full data sets and lab notebooks every year. A red tape nightmare looms

Details of the association agreement show the UK may only get a refund due to low participation in Horizon if it rolls over into the FP10 successor programme, due to start in 2028. And there are pending negotiations on the terms on which the UK rejoins the Copernicus earth observation system

Brussels should aim to increase the dependence of other powers on the EU, not just reduce its own dependencies. This means investing to stay ahead where it dominates key parts of supply chains

Some university leaders are encouraged by UK joining, while one now feels ‘alone in Europe’. Meanwhile, in the latest severing of links, the Commission has shut the Swiss out of a university translation network