CNN.com – Scientists find secret to gas-free beans – Apr 25, 2006:
Scientists find secret to gas-free beansTuesday, April 25, 2006; Posted: 3:05 p.m. EDT (19:05 GMT)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Two strains of bacteria are the key to making beans flatulence-free, Venezuelan researchers reported on Tuesday.
They identified two bacteria, Lactobacillus casei and Lactobacillus plantarum, which can be added to beans so they cause minimal distress to those who eat them, and to those around the bean-lovers, Marisela Granito of Simon Bolivar University in Caracas, Venezuela and colleagues reported.
I guess Venezuelans are either done trying to solve bigger problems, or they really, really hate farts.
I can’t decide whether I’m amused or irritated by this. The indecision should tell me that the answer is both, but it just seems really irresponsible to spend time and money researching this when there are so many other important things to spend them on.
Who am I kidding? There’s likely someone about to make a brazillion dollars off of this work, and they probably funded the whole thing. That’s the way the world works.
2 Comments
Fir
Unfortunately the easy+useful problems have for the most part been solved; the hard+useful ones have to be worked on by teams of people rather than pairs. Folding at stanford have teams of up to 15, with goodness knows how many CPUs to help them. And even the seemingly trivial problems can have good uses; there was the one that came up last year about bubbles in beer, which I’m sure the researcher(s) enjoyed a lot; but while it seems trivial it lays good ground for the understanding of probability theory in fluid mechanics; no-one knows the rules for fluid dynamics, because they’re too complicated for us to have found out and are affected by the mighty Quantum; people still have to try things out in wind tunnels with best-guess-so-far models.
Just consider flatulence reduction as an attempt to reduce global warming or something :) and for a Venezuelan team, who will likely be worse-provisioned than many of the research teams around the world, I’d say that’s not too bad work :)
And… it leaves those more-important-things to be worked on by the people with better equipment, since this one is now done!
Disclaimer: I don’t know how stocked Venezuelan Universities are, but neither the country nor the university itself rings bells for scientific excellence.
Dork
Eh: good point about the easy problems being solved, but I can’t help feeling that even small contributions to the larger problems would help solve them quicker (in the cases of Folding and SETI, for example).
While I realize diminishing returns prevent magically speeding up a solution by simply adding money, the financial reality of having to fund research provides the rationale that conserving the money by cancelling the meaningless research leads to more stable funding of the worthwhile projects.