THINKING OUTSIDE OF THE CUBE

The 2023 Ig Nobel prizes have been presented and amongst the more interesting winning papers was Rice University researcher Daniel J. Preston and his work on “re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools.” Which although sounding silly allows the spiders to be moved to pick up small objects and has real potential engineering applications.

The awards aim to make people laugh and then think and their hero should be Andre Geim who has won both, the Ig Nobel, for levitating frogs and the Nobel prize, for using carbon lattices. Guess which one is more interesting for most people. The more people that think about science the better the world will be.

As a science teacher, now retired, I worked to inspire students to follow science as a career path and the stories of the Ig Nobel prize winners and their research excited students far more than those of the Nobel winners. Science should be serious but also able to see the fun in their work.

Maybe it would be worth looking at the University of Tasmania’s Ig Nobel winning work on why wombat poo comes out as a cube of poo. This will encourage ‘outside of the box’ thinking even if it is a cubic box.

Dennis Fitzgerald,
Melbourne, Australia