The circus was in town for FABI’s annual meeting of the Society for the Presentation of Outrageous Facts (SPOOF) hosted on 17 July. FABIans dressed up in all manner of creative costumes for this year’s Circus theme and enjoyed an evening of laughter and good company. SPOOF is an annual tradition started at Cornell University with FABI inaugurated as the Epsilon Chapter in 1997 when Prof. Mike Wingfield hosted the first local gathering. It has been hosted yearly ever since, including a virtual event during the 2020 Covid lockdown.

The FABI Social Club, under the leadership of Melandré van Lill, pulled out all the stops to ensure the evening was a resounding success. This year’s event drew five entries but, in the end, there can be only one winner for the various SPOOF awards!

The awards for Best Dressed Female went to Alida van Dijk and Best Dressed Male was won by Christiaan Grobler.  The Best Video Award and the Best Abstract Award went to the Rhizobia group. Bianca Prozesky and Anicka Nel’s “Pulling back the side-swoop bangs” won them the Best Presentation Award for revealing the impact on Fusarium growth of playing Blink 182’s single “I Miss You” on a loop over varying time periods!

The evening’s other presentations included Quantifying the relationship between coffee consumption and PCR success that investigated the optimal caffeine dose for amplification success. In Beyond Human Error: Evidence for Cryptic Laboratory Entities, revealed that laboratory failures cannot fully be explained by stochastic human error alone! The Plant Science Complex fourth floor biotech group revealed the Secret to a Successful PCR while the F-Factor: A reality-TV investigation into fungal lifestyles and postgraduate productivity presentation suggested that symbiotic collaboration is the most effective strategy for postgraduate survival.

FABI will celebrate its 30^th anniversary of hosting SPOOF in 2027, so expect even more outrageous facts to be presented at this anniversary event!