And the Ig Nobel Award Goes to Plastics Research by Way of Drunk Worms

The Ig Nobel Prizes are sort of a spoof award, given annually to researchers who study unusual topics. The common thread of the winners is that their research can be made to sound ridiculous.

Making fun of unusual research is nothing new. You may remember Senator Proxmire from Wisconsin, who would monthly give out a “Golden Fleece Award” for squandering public money, much of which went to researchers whose work made for a good punchline. Going further back, Jonathon Swift devoted several pages of Gulliver’s Travels to mocking the "dubious" research that was carried out back in his lifetime (around 1700). Clearly, non-technical people questioning the value of research is nothing new.

A serious spoof

I led in with a description of the Ig Nobels as sort of a spoof award. The awarding organization is quite clear, however, that the winners are researching topics that at first make you laugh, but then also make you think. There is something serious behind all the humor — they’re not just mocking what appears to be wasteful spending.

One of the 2024 winners involves a topic that is related to plastics in a non-obvious fashion. Their research involved drunk worms racing sober worms. A non-obvious fashion? Maybe a very non-obvious fashion. Let me explain.

Related:Weaker Polymer Bonds Produce Stronger Materials, Researchers Claim

Wiggle with a purpose

One parallel between worms and the polymer chains that make up plastics should be obvious — both are long and thin, but the similarities stop there. While worms wiggle, as do polymer chains, the outcome is quite different. At any temperature when a plastic is non-solid, the chains are randomly jostled in all directions. Unlike with worms, all this back-and-forth motion doesn’t move the polymer chains anywhere, as the randomness of the motion cancels itself out. If you could look at an individual polymer chain and mark its location, it would still be there later on. By contrast, worms are able to take their wiggling and turn it into directed motion.

A class of plastics known as “active polymers” can act like worms and be directed toward specific locations. To explain how this happens would require an exciting set of lectures — Don’t forget what my day-job is! — so let’s just accept that it happens. (But there will be a quiz at the end of this article.)

What drunk worms can tell us about inactive polymers

Worms are much easier to study than individual polymer chains because of their macroscopic size. The researchers needed something that could simulate less active or inactive polymers, and so drunken worms were used. (Surprisingly, they sober up in about 10 minutes, so you have to work fast.) The results showed that this setup can be used to mimic what happens with active polymers, but the results are so much easier to achieve. That’s the connection between drunk worm races, plastics, and this year’s Ig Noble Prizes.

Laughing is perfectly natural, but following that up by thinking is pretty uncommon. Not enough people dig deep enough to reach the thinking stage. Pretty much any research can be misconstrued and mocked: Being neck-deep in election campaigns, you know all too well that pretty much anything a person says can be misconstrued and mocked! Taking the time to dig to the bottom and recognize that your initial perceptions are probably wrong and that you’re missing something takes, well, time, and who has a surplus of that? It’s ok to question others, but you need to question yourself just as much.