Ig Nobel Prize winner Daniel Bonn, together with colleagues Menno Demmenie and Stefan Kooij, celebrates the winter holiday season by playing with ice. They explain:
“We love ice; not just because we are based in the Netherlands, where we yearn for skating on frozen canals, but also because of its fascinating physics. This December, we devised a way to 3D print intricate ice sculptures without external refrigeration. Just a water jet inside a vacuum chamber.”
These videos show the making, then the melting, of the ice tree:
Jennifer Ouellette write a cool appreciation of the ice tree, in Ars Technica.
Worms, Worms, Worms
About that Ig Nobel Prize:
The 2024 Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize was awarded to Tess Heeremans, Antoine Deblais, Daniel Bonn, and Sander Woutersen, for using chromatography to separate drunk and sober worms.
REFERENCE: “Chromatographic Separation of Active Polymer–Like Worm Mixtures by Contour Length and Activity,” Tess Heeremans, Antoine Deblais, Daniel Bonn, and Sander Woutersen, Science Advances, vol. 8, no. 23, 2022, article eabj7918.
Last week, Bonn and Ig co-winner Antoine Deblaise starred (with other Ig winners) in three Ig Nobel shows in Paris, where their focus was on the worms, not the ice trees. You can see and hear them in upcoming Ig Nobel shows in the 2026 Ig Nobel EuroTour.