Here are ten odd but interesting projects currently being funded by the National Science Foundation. To keep this funny instead of scary, I’m not listing the amount of money the government is giving each of these; however, they’re all linked to the grant profiles so you can check it out for yourself if you’re feeling brave.  This is just a sampling of current grants. You can search for others by keyword on the National Science Foundation website.

1. RAPID: Role of Ephemeral Bottom Roughness Patches in Unpredictable Recruitment of Surfclams on the Continental Shelf. I hadn’t previously associated clams with recruiting but now I know they’ve got it as hard as the armed forces, without the marked parking spots.
2. Collaborative Research: AToL: Phylogeny on the Half-shell — Assembling the Bivalve Tree of Life An ambitious (and expensive) program to document mollusks and teach school kids evolution; who are generally known to be so fascinated by clams that they are guaranteed to pay attention (not).
3. A Longitudinal Study of the Impact of Social Networks and the Internet on Relationship Formation Someone is finally going to analyze whether online dating really works – maybe that old e-Harmony guy will have to revise a few things. Problem is it’s a longitudinal study to look at divorce rates as well so by the time it comes out we’ll all have moved on to meeting mates on reality shows or spaceships or something.
4. Building an Engineering Technology Workforce: A Plan for Reaching Young People, Adults and Women I’m sure the researchers’ hearts are in the right place, but my quick tip is that they’ll have better luck getting women into their program if they stop inferring that they aren’t adults.
5. Collaborative Proposal: Science with the Allen Telescope Array Yes, really – tax dollars are going to ‘listen’ for aliens and money well spent, I say; bound to help the economy recover when the aliens show up and start shopping.
6. Domestication of the Donkey: Aridity, Mobility and the Development of African Pastoral Societies A three-year study on domesticating donkeys. Possibly because no one has done it before?
7. Have you spotted me: Learning lessons by looking for ladybugs A public science project for little kids (5-11) to be part of a national science project and ginormous database; all about ladybugs.
8. Causes and Consequences of Rapid Sexual Signal Change in a Field Cricket Apparently a non-native species is having some relationship issues on Kaui of all places and will require several researchers to spend a lot of time in Hawaii figuring it all out.
9. HRI: The Robotic Musician – Facilitating Novel Musical Experiences and Outcomes through Human Robot Interaction Funding for a humanoid robot that plays the marimba; the abstract doesn’t say why it’s the marimba exactly but you can’t cite them for non-specificity.
10. Fingerprinting the Metabolom of Wine The NurdleNet prize for academic obfuscation and creative justification for using wine as a research tool (yes, sampling does appear to be an inherent part of the study.)