• Question: Whats your favourite experiment?

    Asked by 366enqm32 to sakshisharda, Dan, Jennifer, Luke, Martin on 12 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: Jennifer Paxton

      Jennifer Paxton answered on 12 Mar 2018:

      My favourite experiments are the ones going on in my lab at the moment! We are trying to build new parts of the body in a dish and although we can’t make them as big and strong as we need to (yet!!), we are getting there! I’m trying to build bone and tendon – important parts of your musculoskeletal system that help us to support our bodies and to move!

    • Photo: Sakshi Sharda

      Sakshi Sharda answered on 13 Mar 2018:

      My favourite experiment is finding out differences between men and women, with respect to how their immunity differs.

    • Photo: Luke Williams

      Luke Williams answered on 13 Mar 2018:

      My favourite experiment of all those I have heard of? Actually nothing that I have ever done!

      There are three that fascinate me – the Lenski experiment is one, started by Richard Lenski back in 1988. The *same* experiment is still going on today!! He started by taking twelve colonies of bacteria, two sets of six identical ones, and growing them. Each day he takes some of them out, gives them more food, and puts them back. Every day for year after year after year. Of course, he is not the one doing it all now, but they are still going. Because the bacteria divide every 20 or 30 minutes, this means there have been tens of thousands of generations, and you can watch them evolving over the years. Some began taking different sugars as food, for example. Really really cool stuff.

      Another reaaaaalllllly long experiment is the pitch-drop experiment, which is literally just waiting for some really really REALLY thick liquid called bitumen to drip. If you know how long it takes for a liquid to drip out a container, you can work out how thick it is. This experiment started in 1927!!! Over that time, there have been eight drops. The experiment is believed to have another hundred years to go.

      Lastly, the Miller-Urey experiment has some gases in a sealed tube, with some water and heated. Finally a spark is added, to represent lightening. Through this experiment it was shown how life may have started on Earth. The gases were chosen to be similar to what was in the air a long time ago – and by having lightening fire through the water vapour and gas you can form amino acids, a key part of life today.

    • Photo: Martin Lindley

      Martin Lindley answered on 14 Mar 2018:

      Mine of course 🙂 that’s why I am doing it !

      I do enjoy exercise experiments as well especially if we get to take samples of blood and muscle from the volunteer.

    • Photo: Dan Gordon

      Dan Gordon answered on 14 Mar 2018:

      Tricky. My favorite experiment ever was actually run in the USA back in the early 1900’s where they tried to find out if we had a spiritual sole. So they deduced that if we do have a sole it must exist and therefore must have a mass. So they tried to record the mass (weight) of the sole. To do this they decided that when someone dies they would loose their sole, so tried to record the changes in mass while people died. Very gruesome study in many ways but they did find that as people took their last breath that they lost around 10g in mass. !!!!
      As for my work, my favorite experiment is one that is going on now, trying to understand how children pace themselves so we are collecting data on this now, but need your help to get more and understand this.

Comments