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Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn Report Shows Taxpayer Money Spent on Robots That Fold Laundry, Shrimp on TreadmillsBy JONATHAN KARL and MATTHEW JAFFE May 26, 2011 You've probably heard of shrimp on the barbie, but what about shrimp on a treadmill? The National Science Foundation has, and it spent $500,000 of taxpayer money researching it. It's not entirely clear what this research hoped to establish. But it's one of a number of projects cited in a scathing new report from Sen. Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, exclusively obtained by ABC News. It's not just shrimp on a treadmill. The foundation...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Hundreds of millions of US taxpayer dollars have been wasted on everything from doughnuts to rockets, auditors told Congress Thursday as budget-minded lawmakers prepared to slash science funding. For example, hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent each month on a NASA program to return Americans to the moon, even though the US space agency, Congress and President Barack Obama have agreed not to proceed with it. Old, rundown buildings are draining 300 million dollars a year from NASA in repair costs alone, and at least one space telescope project has run billions over budget, more...

Four Federal agencies are funding at least 95 'Climate education programs'. These programs are specifically designed to influence students, teachers, and the public in general about climate change. Based on their summaries (which I will share) these programs are not intended to present information and let the public decide for themselves. Instead, they are designed for two goals. One, to influence the public to accept and take action on climate change. Two, to increase the future workforce involved in climate change fields. I will take each agency in turn, look at their stated goals, then look through some of the...

WELLINGTON (AFP) – An extraordinary underground observatory for subatomic particles has been completed in a huge cube of ice one kilometre on each side deep under the South Pole, researchers said. Building the IceCube, the world's largest neutrino observatory, has taken a gruelling decade of work in the Antarctic tundra and will help scientists study space particles in the search for dark matter, invisible material that makes up most of the Universe's mass. The observatory, located 1,400 metres underground near the US Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, cost more than 270 million dollars, according to the US National Science Foundation (NSF)....

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/statement-president-national-broadband-plan Home • Briefing Room • Statements & Releases The White House Office of the Press Secretary For Immediate Release March 16, 2010 Statement from the President on the National Broadband Plan America today is on the verge of a broadband-driven Internet era that will unleash innovation, create new jobs and industries, provide consumers with new powerful sources of information, enhance American safety and security, and connect communities in ways that strengthen our democracy. Just as past generations of Americans met the great infrastructure challenges of the day, such as building the Transcontinental...

If you think $50,000 doesn’t buy what it used to, think again. For that rough sum, a professor at UCLA has agreed to draw up a report that proves opponents of the Democrats’ health-care bill aren’t motivated by a sense of fiscal responsibility or a general distrust of back-room deals, but by race. The kicker? Taxpayers are funding the study. According to the study’s abstract, provided by the National Science Foundation, a government agency under the control of the executive branch: “This research project attempts to provide further evidence for this Obama-induced racialization by pinpointing the extent that health-care opinions...

A legal battle is heating up faster than the planet for embattled climatologist Michael Mann. First word emerged that the inspector general for the National Science Foundation would look into the Penn State panel reviewing the climate scientist, who is currently director of the school's Earth System Science Center. Now the attorney general for his old employer the University of Virginia is planning an investigation, too.

Employee misconduct investigations, often involving workers accessing pornography from their government computers, grew sixfold last year inside the taxpayer-funded foundation that doles out billions of dollars of scientific research grants, according to budget documents and other records obtained by The Washington Times. The problems at the National Science Foundation (NSF) were so pervasive they swamped the agency's inspector general and forced the internal watchdog to cut back on its primary mission of investigating grant fraud and recovering misspent tax dollars. "To manage this dramatic increase without an increase in staff required us to significantly reduce our efforts to investigate grant...

A section describing survey results about the American public's beliefs about evolution and the Big Bang was removed from the 2010 edition of Science and Engineering Indicators. According to a post on the AAAS's Science Insider blog (April 8, 2010) and a subsequent report in Science (April 9, 2010; subscription required), although survey results about evolution and the Big Bang have regularly appeared in the National Science Board's Science and Engineering Indicators, its biennial compilation of global data about science, engineering, and technology, they were absent from the 2010 edition. NCSE's Joshua Rosenau decried the decision, saying, "Discussing American science...

This story is a double-edged sword. On one hand the Washington Times has found that spending working hours on internet porn is rampant at the National Science Foundation and has grown sixfold in the past year, but on the bright side while they are screwing around on porn sites, they aren't screwing around with the country. Like when the Foundation awarded a grant of more than $325,000 to Daniel Shain, professor at Rutgers University, to trek to Alaska in search of the elusive ice worm. Unfortunately, he and several students spent two weeks last August hunting through snow and ice...

Even journalists are beginning to revolt at tactics the government is now using to spin the Global Warming myth. Controversy erupted this week at the World Conference of Science Journalists over the National Science Foundation's "underwriting" of media projects. It turns out that the NSF, which is heavily invested in propagating the Global Warming party line, has been quietly producing content for news outlets, content which the casual observer might not recognize for the propaganda it is. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, the NSF's Jeff Nesbit was met with "consternation" at the London conference for "attempting to 'disguise' publicity as...

Even journalists are beginning to revolt at tactics the government is now using to spin the Global Warming myth. Controversy erupted this week at the World Conference of Science Journalists over the National Science Foundation's "underwriting" of media projects. It turns out that the NSF, which is heavily invested in propagating the Global Warming party line, has been quietly producing content for news outlets, content which the casual observer might not recognize...

DAMASCUS // The birth of the National Salvation Front (NSF) in the spring of 2006 prompted intense speculation that the Syrian opposition, for so long weak and divided, had unified and would launch a serious challenge to the leadership of Bashar Assad, the president. Syria had just been forced to withdraw its army from Lebanon, a major setback for the regime, and was under intense pressure from the international community for reform. Abdelhalim Khaddam, the former vice president, had defected to Brussels and vowed to reveal many regime secrets and a political storm was brewing over Damascus. In this turbulent...

Thursday February 26, 2009 The Pornification of a Culture -- What's Going on in the Office Next Door? Commentary by Dr. Albert MohlerFebruary 26, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The scourge of pornography is now so pervasive that it begins to define the culture at large.  America is fast transforming itself from a society that allows and markets pornography into a culture that is pornographic.  Boundary after boundary is being transgressed.Adding insult to injury, courts have ruled that public libraries have no right to use filters that prevent viewing of pornography on public computers.  Now, the marketers of pornography are looking...

Chuck Grassley knows it when he sees it. The “it,” of course, is pornography. And Grassley has seen it deep in a demurely titled section of a report from the National Science Foundation — a report that says NSF employees have been spending significant amounts of company time on smut sites and in other explicit pursuits. Grassley, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, on Tuesday fired off a letter to the NSF’s inspector general requesting all documents related to the “numerous reports” and seven investigations into “Abuse of NSF IT Resources” cited in the foundation’s 68-page semiannual report....

An influential psychiatrist who was the host of the popular public radio program “The Infinite Mind” earned at least $1.3 million from 2000 to 2007 giving marketing lectures for drugmakers, income not mentioned on the program. The psychiatrist and radio host, Dr. Frederick K. Goodwin, is the latest in a series of doctors and researchers whose ties to drugmakers have been uncovered by Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa. Dr. Goodwin, a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, is the first news media figure to be investigated. Dr. Goodwin’s weekly radio programs have often touched on...

You're pounding the keyboard, double-clicking away, sighing and grumbling, but to no avail: That devilish little hourglass icon refuses to give way to the Web site you're trying to reach. Most Internet users have encountered trouble reaching online destinations, but they often attribute the problem to their wireless network cutting out or a server momentarily going down. Sometimes, though, the problem is more mysterious. At any given moment, messages throughout the world are lost to cyber black holes, according to new computer science research. Ethan Katz-Bassett, a graduate student in computer science at the University of Washington, and his advisor,...

Title IX Conquers Science by: Malcolm A. Kline, March 13, 2008 When feminists attempted to open up college sports opportunities for women via federal Title IX regulations, national enforcement of these rules had the perhaps unintended consequence of hastening the demise of men’s teams at the collegiate level. Now they are attempting something much more ambitious—the feminization of science. In the latest issue of The American, Christina Hoff Sommers reports on legislation making its way through the U. S. Congress designed to lessen the male dominance of the hard sciences. Additionally, the Bush Administration has already funneled millions of dollars...

Dr Gaurav Khanna is a professor at the University of Massachusetts. He has been renting supercomputers at NASA and the US National Science Foundation for US$20,000-$30,000 a year to run complicated calculations on just how much radiation is emitted in the process of a black hole swallowing a star... "For US$4,000 or so, I can get eight PS3s that can do the same task that I'd do on a supercomputer. For a one-time cost, I have this resource I can use privately. I can use it indefinitely over and over again. That's hugely attractive. That's why I considered the project....

Title IX Termagants by: Malcolm A. Kline, February 08, 2008 Not content to merely disrupt college sports with federal Title IX rules that mandate parity between men’s and women’s sports whether the ladies want to play or not, feminists are trying to feminize science, even if women do not want to pursue it as a career. As I pointed out in an article in The American Enterprise magazine back in 2005, the National Science Foundation gives grants to female engineering students far in excess of the percentage of the profession, or for that matter the student body in the field...