Studying maggots a better job than being a Microsoft security grunt?

It's the latter apparently, at least if one were to go by Popular Science magazine's list of the top 10 worst jobs in science for 2007.

The tongue-in-cheek list salutes "the men and women who do what no salary can adequately reward." It ranks a Microsoft security worker's job at No. 6, one notch worse than that of a gravity research subject and slightly better than that of a coursework carcass preparer.

A Microsoft security grunt's job is "like wearing a big sign that reads 'Hack Me,'" according to the magazine.

"Do you flinch when your inbox dings? The people manning secure@microsoft.com receive approximately 100,000 dings a year, each one a message that something in the Microsoft empire may have gone terribly wrong," the magazine says, explaining the ranking. "Plus, to most hackers, crippling Microsoft is the geek equivalent of taking down the Death Star, so the assault is relentless."

So what jobs on the list fared better? Whale researchers whose job it is to scoop up whale dung and then dig through it for clues apparently did not have it as bad as Microsoft security grunts. And neither did forensic entomologists who solve murders by studying maggots, nor gravity research subjects who can spend up to 21 days lying motionless in bed with head tilted at a 6-degree angle.

The jobs that fared worse included that of carcass preparers who "kill, pickle, and bottle the critters that school kids cut up," and elephant vasectomists. Hazmat divers had the worst job on the list, because they "swim in sewage. Enough said."

This is the fifth annual complication of the list by the editors of Popular Science. In previous years, the list has included jobs such as orangutan pee collector and Kansas biology teacher.