Academic grants can work in a lot of ways. It is common for a significant chunk to be taken as overhead by the university (20-40%). This is generally smaller for senior members of the faculty who bring in more grants. The PI (primary investigator, read: dude with a reputation) tends to get 5-10% to run the program, and then another 30-40% goes to salaries for researchers working under them (read: grad students). The rest, on the order of 20%, goes to capital costs like materials, time on expensive machines, or prototypes.

So this guy probably got paid $1-2M directly for the grants over maybe 3-5 years. Note I haven't looked into his specific situation.

Really excellent article with just the right amount of bizarre and nostalgic content.

Gonna need this reworked to include pachycephalosaurus.

This thread has some great ones, and quite a few of the folks I'd consider the best. But I haven't seen anyone mention Stuff Made Here! What gives?

I highly recommend Hype Machine for properly new and sometimes unexpected music. Downside is that you need to sort through some stuff you might not enjoy but upside is pretty solid when you find a new artist! More organic than any of the prediction-based discovery apps.