I still think about a New Fellows’ induction at my college a few years ago where they had all of the new fellows give a short overview of their research. And there was one whose talk was ‘I’m an aerospace engineer! I work with volcanologists! I build drones that fly into volcanoes! Here is a video of one of my drones flying into a volcano! We send them in to collect gas samples and return, but they also have lots of sensors and telemetry. So we fly them lower and lower until they catch fire! Here is a video of one of my drones catching fire and falling into the lava!’

The guy who went after her was the most upstaged I have ever seen anyone be. He had to follow that with ‘I study French poetry, here is a French poem. It has themes.’ And I felt bad for him because there was no possible talk that could not have been a letdown in his slot. Unless, perhaps, it was ‘I train resurrected dinosaurs to use rocket launchers’.