Snark, Critic and Pop!

Your Tax Dollars At Work, Ladies & Gentlemen:

Inquiring minds at Albany Medical College played music to a group of unsophisticated rats, who preferred Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” over Miles Davis’s “Four” and preferred silence over any music at all. When they sweetened the deal by adding cocaine to their least preferred options, however, they found that rats would reverse their preferences, even choosing jazz over classical.

In another study published in 2011, the same experimenters supported by the same NIH grants again used Miles Davis” “Four,” but this time exposed rats to methamphetamine to determine the drug’s effects on rats’ learned conditioning.

These studies were supported by two grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. One of the grants was a T32 institutional training grant regarding the pharmacology and neuroscience of drug abuse. At least six pre- and post-doctoral fellows, who could become members of the next generation of animal experimenters, have been trained and supported with this grant.

Can I stop paying taxes now? Also, if possible, let’s do away with that whole “death” thing.

By the way, rats, try Miles sans cocaine, methinks you’ll like it: