National Institutes of Health (NIH):
$1.5 million to find out why three-fourths of American lesbians are overweight when most gay males are not;
$400,000 to find out why men in Argentina engage in risky sexual behavior while drunk;
$442,000 to study the behavior of male prostitutes in Vietnam;
$593,000 study to figure out why chimpanzees throw their poop;
$176,000 to determine whether quail are more likely to procreate when high on cocaine;
666,900 for a study on the benefits of watching TV reruns;
$387,000 giving 18 New Zealand White rabbits Swedish massages after exercise, to see if they felt better.
Department of Agriculture (USDA)
$300,000 to encourage Americans to eat caviar produced in Idaho;
$50,000 to help pay for the annual Hawaiian Chocolate Festival;
30,000 to farmers developing a database of farms that host guests for overnight “haycations;”
$700,000 to study methane gas emissions from dairy cows.
promotional efforts
$505,000 “to promote specialty hair and beauty products for cats and dogs;”
$75,000 grant to promote awareness of Michigan Christmas trees and poinsettias is probably helpful to the local producers;
neon sign museum in Las Vegas ($1.8 million);
magic museum in Marshall, Michigan ($147,000);
Mother’s Day Shrine in Grafton, West Virginia ($123,050).
U.S. Air Force spent $300,000 on a study to find how is life on the Western Slope enhanced by knowing that the first bird on Earth probably had black feathers;
National Science Foundation
$171,000 monkeys like to gamble
government’s burning questions
$331,000) gave hungry spouses voodoo dolls to stab, representing their partners, and concluded that apparently people get irritable when they get hungry;
$500 million to find out why 5-year-old children can’t sit still in kindergarten;
216,000 to study whether or not politicians “gain or lose support by taking ambiguous positions;”
$400,000 on a program to train politicians in India how to communicate with their constituents.
Too much money, but if they really found out a medical reason for this, maybe it would be generally useful to lots of other people. For instance it might identify hormonal differences that cause weight gain or that make it more likely that a girl will grow up to become a lesbian.