The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded an initial US$46 million in funding under the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative to over 100 investigators.

The lowdown: Last year, the NIH joined forces with the National Science Foundation, the US Food and Drug Administration and the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to give a major boost to neuroscience through the BRAIN Initiative. The BRAIN Initiative has now announced its first wave of funding. Fifty-eight awards, which are aimed primarily at fostering new tools and technologies that can be used to probe the brain, will enable researchers to catalogue the types of cells in the brain, and to develop better brain-imaging approaches, tools to analyse neural circuits and technologies with which to record brain activity.

Last year, Thomas Insel, the Director of the US National Institute of Mental Health, and Story Landis, the former Director of the US National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), jointly lamented the continued lack of basic knowledge about how the brain works (Neuron 80, 561–567; 2013). The BRAIN Initiative should help to address some of this knowledge gap, but Landis told Nature Reviews Drug Discovery last month that the NINDS has also been studying and rethinking its funding strategy to ensure that basic research doesn't stagnate (Nature Rev. Drug Discov. 13, 718–719; 2014).