NSF Funds Search for Keys to Life's Greatest Secrets
Thursday June 19, 2008
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded four grants ranging from nearly $530,000 to just over $1.3 million to fund research leading to answers for the "enduring questions of life."
While these taxpayer-funded studies will not tell you why 12 socks go into the dryer but only 11 come out, or why gasoline costs $5.00 a gallon, they may reveal:
- How the toothless baleen whale eats. Come on, you know you've been dwelling on that one.
- Environmental impacts on tropical mountain cloud forests, which comprise "no more than 2.5 percent of all tropical forests."
- The level of exploitation of the Amazon River ecosystem by native Amazonians before the native Amazonians were decimated by Europeans starting in 1492. A question that "has loomed since the 1990s."
- How one-celled volvocine algae evolves into multi-celled volvocine algae.
"Each of these studies will reveal a different piece of the puzzle of evolution," said Robert Sterner director of NSF's Division of Environmental Biology in a press release. "Therefore, when they are completed, we will have a much better understanding of the history and future of life on earth." But probably not where the missing sock goes.
Also See:
Rich People Buy More Plants, NSF Study Fines
Sad People Spend More Money, NSF Study Finds
Comments
Is the algae the same kind proposed as a biofuel? I’d like to get a grant to demonstrate the effects of the Army Corps of Engineers on the flow of water in the west and how about a study on the quality of the levees and why more sturdier reserviors weren’t made? (This is just a simplistic suggestion that I have more thought and detail to.) Why isn’t there something like tanks with a pipeline so the water could be stored and used later as in irrigation instead of spreading loosely all over and wreaking havoc? These are questions I ponder.