The Benefits of Science Funding

The NY Times attacks Pres. Trump on a daily basis, and even in the science pages:

The government spends $200 billion annually on research and development, knowing that payoffs might be decades away; that figure would drop sharply under President Trump’s proposed 2026 budget. ...

Here are nine more life-altering advances that government investment made possible.

The government has indeed funded a lot of great work, but the list is not so great.

If you’re reading this on a screen, you’re looking at quantum dots, billions of them.

Quantum dots are tiny crystals of semiconductor stuff, 10 nanometers (billionths of a meter) or smaller in size, and they have become a mainstay of consumer electronics.

No, the technology is used on some high-end displays, but not on most screens. And a typical display has millions of pixels, but not billions.

Are you a robot? Probably not. We know this — “we” being any website you visit that asks you that question — thanks to a security technology called CAPTCHA, a digital puzzle that weeds out nonhuman bots that might be trying to disrupt a billing system or other valuable database.

This technology is now a big nuisance, as the bots are better able to solve the puzzles than humans.

The company’s work on the moon drill paved the way for the development of a suite of cordless consumer products, including the Dustbuster, a hand-held vacuum cleaner that came to define a whole new category of cleaning products.

This is ridiculous. We did not need the Moon for battery-powered tools.

In recent decades, however, many NICUs have begun providing and promoting more comforting forms of touch, including infant massage — an innovation that grew out of a chance observation in a university rat lab.

Now I think the NYT is trolling us. Really? No one had the idea to touch babies until some government scientists played with some rats?!