Which scientific projects are pursued at the Academy of Lagado?

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Illustration of Lemuel Gulliver lying on the ground, tied down by tiny Lilliputians, with crowds and small buildings in the background, from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. — Gulliver’s Travels Lemuel Gulliver in Lilliput, illustration from an edition of Jonathan Swift's *Gulliver's Travels*.

In the novel Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, the Academy of Lagado serves as a travesty of England’s Royal Society. The "lunatic savants" at this institution pursue various wholly impractical and absurd scientific projects, which include:12

Extracting sunbeams from cucumbers.2
Reducing human excrement to its original food.1

These projects are depicted as part of Swift’s broader satire on the impractical nature of certain intellectual and pedantic pursuits of his time, contrasting the scientists' obsession with abstract or useless theories against the resulting squalor and ruin of the surrounding countryside.2