The Senate’s top watchdog on government waste, in a new report Thursday, said taxpayer money has gone to fund such programs as Jell-O wrestling at the South Pole, testing shrimp’s exercise ability on a treadmill and a laundry-folding robot, all funded by the National Science Foundation. At a time when the federal government is struggling with record deficits and bumping up against its borrowing limit, Mr. Coburn said the agency is a prime example of the kinds of spending taxpayers should no longer tolerate. In one instance NSF employees, in their spare time, engaged in a Jell-O wrestling contest at the agency’s McMurdo research station at the South Pole. In another case, the agency paid $559,681 to test sick shrimp’s metabolism, which one researcher said was “the first time that shrimp have been exercised on a treadmill.”
Mr. Coburn’s report noted that the researchers found sick shrimp “did not perform as well and did not recover as well from exercise as healthy shrimp.”
And just in case this story seems like bullshit, as it did to me:
Humans fighting an infection typically sleep more and are not at top physical performance. “The situation is much more critical for a sick marine crustacean, such as a shrimp, where a decrease in performance may mean the difference between life and death,” said David Scholnick, a biologist from Pacific University.
The shrimp treadmill, invented and built by Scholnick, allows researchers to measure the activity of an exercising shrimp for a set period of time at known speed and oxygen levels.
“As far as I know this is the first time that shrimp have been exercised on a treadmill and it was amazing to see how well they performed,” Scholnick told LiveScience. “Healthy shrimp ran and swam at treadmill speeds of up to 20 meters per minute [66 feet per minute] for hours with little indication of fatigue.”
I used to really enjoy eating shrimp until I saw this video. They really are ugly little insects, might as well be eating locusts.
I know! Let’s be like conservatives and take all our science research money and use it build stuff that blows up!
That helps us all.
As for me, even a shrimp tread mill is a better investment than a cruise missile.
Shrimp are an important species in many regards including as a cash crop. Studying them is reasonable and prudent. I’m not sure how fast the water above the tread mill was actually moving and most of the time the shrimp weren’t touching the tread mill but rather swimming above it.
Why does this crappy research have to be done at the South Pole. Shouldn’t they be saving these tests for the International Space Station? That way they could better justify the station’s costs. Doing miracle research that simply couldn’t be done anywhere else. Unless they actually tried to. Then it could.
This is the same NSF that refutes Intelligent design, in other to force the “hypothesis” (not theory) of Natural Selection and Evolution. And yet said foundation can’t manage to adhere to a budget, or summit expense reports on time. OR AT ALL! So it’s just a case of, “Trust us, gives us the money, and believe everything we claim, without the follow up proof.” Proof just slows them down. Especially at the South Pole. Where they need the spare time to Jello wrestle.
A while back, a woman researcher who knew she had cancer (and I guess the NSF probably knew), deliberately traveled down to the polar research site. Only to require very expensive surgery, once she got there. Does the NSF do zero screening, for health issues? Just as any other civilian employers do. A lot of money got wasted saving her life, down there. When it could have been done much cheaper (and probably on her own dime), back in the States. But I’m sure her friends at NSF told her to visit the pole, and then the taxpayer would pick up the tab for whatever “emergency” lifesaving treatment she’d need. And the complicit news media would label it as a miracle of science. Not asking why she was even their, if she couldn’t pass a physical?
Taking science out of context and ridiculing it is a long time congressional sport, for which the practitioners should be horse whipped. Almost any scientific work can be made to look foolish, but often some of this work pays off well. As someone who is supposedly knowledgeable about technology, you should know better. If the government had put money into developing a “personal” computer in 1975, it would have looked totally foolish.
#45,
A while back, a woman researcher who knew she had cancer (and I guess the NSF probably knew), deliberately traveled down to the polar research site. Only to require very expensive surgery, once she got there.
Citation please. I would really like to know who knew they had cancer before traveling to the South Pole. And I know you would lie about something this important to make a point.
#45 – probably not anymore. We used to have medicals for working there (at 10,000ft) but they were concerned that somebody who did get sick might sue the NSF – since they had been checked.
So now we are supposed to consult our doctor. Your family doctor is an expert on Acute high altitude reaction syndrome aren’t they?
I don’t know a whole lot about this but at first glance it reminds me a lot about the story where Palin mocked the worm research even though much of modern developmental biology started with first understanding C.elegans. Hey why study bacteria. Why waste time on single celled organisms. They’re not human. Of course we did get penicillin out of that so I think it was a fair trade.
$330,000 per minute on average spent on Afghanistan and Iraq, and we complain about $1 million science studies that increase our base knowledge?
“Scholnick said. ‘These studies will give us a better idea of how marine animals can perform in their native habitat when faced with increasing pathogens and immunological challenges.'”
Yah, that sounds like a terrible waste of time and money…
Usual Republican/Libertarian Tempest in a Teacup…
Rakiah, I have to disagree. I think it’s important that the US gives up on fundamental science and research to become the world leader in Bible Science. It’s important to prove that the Grand Canyon was carved by flood waters from Noah’s time.