The European Court of Auditors says that the Framework Programme 7 grant-awarding process, the main way that the European Union funds scientists, is overly bureaucratic, ScienceInsider reports. The program is to end this year.

The main problem is that program rules require changes to how universities and research institutes tracked projects — according to the court's report, 59 percent of recipients had to put in a new recording system, modify their system, or have two parallel systems in place. Further, program rules were also inconsistently interpreted.

The report, ScienceInsider adds, could lead to changes to the EU's next funding scheme, Horizon 2020.

The European Commission has already made changes to the Framework Programme 7 rules so they are more similar to current practices, a commission spokesperson tells ScienceInsider, adding that "this will continue in Horizon 2020."

Microbes are everywhere, and researchers taking part in the Earth Microbiome Project aim to find out how microorganisms living in soil help support other life on Earth, Jonathon Keats at Wired reports. Janet Jansson from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and her colleagues are collecting samples from a number of locations to tease out the DNA from such organisms.

"The plan is to build a global 'gene atlas,' then to work out how nutrients and waste products migrate through the ecosystem," Keats adds. "Eventually that understanding might allow us to engineer microbes to be ultraefficient producers of biofuel, or even take control of the carbon cycle."

Researchers are particularly interested in samples from the English Channel, farms in the Midwest US, and the Gulf of Mexico near the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. From those sites, they hope to better understand how "small things shape big ecosystems," Keats says.

While adding more data can clarify relationships between organisms and place them on the tree of life, sometimes more data can make the picture look fuzzier. "[J]ust as the spinal column and limbs created contrasting maps of primate evolution, scientists now know that different genes in the same organism can tell different stories," writes Emily Singer at Wired.

Researchers are now turning to algorithms to sort out such phylogenetic relationships, Singer adds. In a recent Nature paper, researchers from Vanderbilt University used a common concatenation approach to build a phylogenetic tree based on 1,070 genes and 23 yeast species and they further built a series of trees based on the genes individually. They then tried to reconcile their trees. However, "none of the 1,070 gene trees agreed with each other, with the concatenation phylogeny or with the [extended majority-rule consensus] phylogeny," the researchers write.

"I am not so sure we know what the true relationships are," Yale University's Michael Donoghue, who was not part of the study, tells Singer. "If we aren't sure what the truth is, we can't tell if we have the right tree."

A hearing held by the House of Representatives science committee earlier this week examined the Obama administration's plan to reorganize US science education programs, ScienceInsider reports. The reorganization would affect some 226 programs at a dozen agencies, consolidating them and moving them to under the aegis of just three agencies, the Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, and the Smithsonian.

While ScienceInsider notes that the proceedings were bereft of partisan bickering, "that comity resulted in a steady stream of skepticism flowing from both sides of the aisle." In particular, legislators seemed concerned about the fate of programs currently at National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose budgets would decrease under the administration's plan.

"Normally, I support efforts to reduce duplicative programs," Representative Randy Hultgren (R-Ill.) said at the hearing. "But this reorganization seems rushed and poorly planned. The president's proposal seems to be taking a number of successful initiatives being done by high-quality groups at the local level and running a majority of them through a federal bureaucracy in Washington."

John Holdren, the president's science adviser, told the panel that the reorganization favored programs for "improving K-12 instruction, reforming undergrad programs around evidence based practices, streamlining the graduate fellowship process, and amplifying engagement activities," according to ScienceInsider.

More than 70 research organizations from across the world have joined together to develop a common framework to share genetic and clinical data, the New York Times reports. Among the organizations that have signed the letter of intent for this effort are the US National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust, BGI-Shenzhen, and Genome Canada, GenomeWeb Daily News adds.

"The question is whether and how we make it possible to learn from these data as they grow, in a manner that respects the autonomy and privacy choices of each participant," David Altshuler from the Broad Institute tells the Times.

According to the white paper put together by the group, the aim of the effort is to develop a global alliance and technological tools for secure data storage that conform to standard principles.

Genomics researchers are 'hotter' than those working in any other field, according to an analysis by Thomson Reuters ScienceWatch that gauges how 'hot' a researcher was during the last year by how many times their recent papers were cited.

Genomics investigators accounted for a sizable section of the hottest boffins in 2012, and the most scorching of these was Richard Wilson at Washington University School of Medicine, who was part of the team behind the Nature report "A Map of Human Genome Variation from Population-scale Sequencing" that detailed findings from the 1,000 Genomes Project. Wilson had 15 total papers from 2010 to 2012 that were cited last year.

Some familiar faces are strewn among the fieriest of the researchers working in genomics during the last year, but some new names crept into the list of the scientists with the most oft-cited papers.

Broad Institute Director and President Eric Lander is still on fire, Thomson found, as he contributed to that Nature paper as well, and he had an additional 12 other highly cited reports, which included genomics research into cancers of the ovaries, blood, and brain, and a report on missing heritability that was among the year's hottest papers. Lander was the hottest on the list during the two previous years.

Decode Genetics President Kari Stefansson made a comeback, jumping to the top of the genomics pyre after missing it last year. He had 13 reports on genomic aspects of Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer's cited last year.

Three of Wilson's fellow Washington University in St. Louis investigators joined him on the hot list, including Elaine Mardis, Li Ding, and Robert Fulton. They contributed to the same 1,000 Genomes paper and authored two other reports that landed in the top papers of the year. University of Michigan biostatistician Goncalo Abecasis, another author on the Nature paper, landed on the list for a dozen recent papers on GWAS studies of diabetes, body-mass index, and cardiovascular disease risk.

Jun Wang from BGI also made the list with 14 hot papers.

The University of Birmingham's Gregory Lip popped up in the survey for the first time, due to his reports on various aspects of atrial fibrillation.

Another newcomer, Rob Knight, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of Colorado, made the hot list for 14 papers that examined the human microbiome.