The supply of scientists and engineers continues to grow in the US, and that unemployment rate, at 2.5 percent, is the lowest it's been since the early 1990s, the National Science Foundation linkurl:reported;http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=111369&govDel=USNSF_51 last week. There's no need to worry about the US's ability to fill science jobs, the agency said in a press release which described a recent analysis of its 2006 science and engineering surveys. Not everyone agrees with the NSF's conclusions. "I think that it's not surprising that the unemployment rate is so low," said Carrie Wolinetz a spokesperson at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB). "You're talking about people who are talented enough to go on to a higher degree in science," she told __The Scientist.__ That group's numbers tell a different story: On Monday FASEB released a linkurl:memo;http://opa.faseb.org/pdf/2008/NIH.Research.Funding.4.08.pdf showing a decline in the numbers of investigators applying for RO1 grants by 1,763...
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