Apparently, physicists have nothing better to to, but there’s always room for Jello.
In your swimming pool, that is.
http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040920/full/040920-2.html
A swimming pool full of snot. How charming
What about the filter? Won’t someone please think of the filter?
What an odd experiment…
When they’re finished with it, maybe they can rent it out to the people at Fear Factor.
Can’t be worse than maggots.
Or give it to Lileks afterwards for his next Gallery of Regrettable Foods. Suspend enough hot dogs in it with a sufficient amount of canned peas and shredded cabbage and you have a treat to feed all of the suburbs…
Now the problem becomes building a finger large enough to get it all out of the pool.
Oh man - if my 6-year-old son heard the phrase “swimming pool full of snot” that is all I would hear about for 2+ months…
Do you think they cleaned it up with regular Kleenex or those Puffs with Aloe Vera, so the sides of the pool wouldn’t get irritated?
There’s actually a really good little bit of subtext in this item regarding the eternal struggle between theorists and experimentalists. Just because it works out one way on the whiteboard doesn’t mean the world will cooperate when you put it into practice. 
I love experiments like this. They’re imaginative, and they end up answering more questions than you think they will.
Knbowledge for knowledge’s sake. Hell yeah. Way to go, Cussler!
I can only image the reviewer’s discussions when that grant comes up for funding. “They want how much for a pool of snot?!?!”
I agree with Ogre. This is what experimental science is all about. 