You Choose the Research...

Funding for scientific research is a sadly politicized process, with lobbyists and businesses deciding what is or is not an important avenue of research. A new website seems to be attempting to change that in some small way.

At YouChooseTheResearch.com, you can place votes at a cost of $1 per vote on different research topics. The organization will, over time, narrow the field to the most popular topics and then funding research on those topics. Current topics include artificial gravity, solar body mining, diabetes, cancer, alternative fuels, nanotech, robotics, and many other areas. You can also offer new topics for consideration if your desired area of research is not currently available.

Of course, the problem with such an endeavor is that you can never know for certain if you can trust something on the internet. I have reviewed the material on the website, and it looks legitimate to me, but I have not investigated it beyond that. The payments for the votes are through PayPal, which means that they are secure.

Even if the website is legitimate, whether they will raise funds sufficient to fund research on the scope they hope to remains to be seen.