“A new grant worth $163,996.......”
You can get a grant to study just about anything, all you have to do is convince that although worthless, someone needs to know how important your findings will be. Time to address the justification for such worthless information.
There are an endless number of taxpayer funded research programs that generate useless information. About their only real benefit is providing employment for college professors. Society would benefit from less wasteful grant spending. Private sources of research funding concentrate their efforts on areas that will get results, as opposed to funding that supports friends, fellow travelers, and reliable voting blocks.