• Question: What's the coolest experiment you do?

    Asked by osmosisloverboy to Andrew, Ash, Gem, Paige, SJ on 28 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Andrew Thomas

      Andrew Thomas answered on 28 Jun 2012:

      I think all my experiments are cool or I wouldn’t do them, and they wouldn’t get funding for me to do them.

      I could reinterpret your question and tell you the coldest experiment I’ve done. We used to look a lot at materials which change from being insulators to conductors as you cool them down. We also looked at superconductors. When we did our experiments we would cool the samples down to a chilly 4 Kelvin (that’s -269 °C) using liquid helium. At 0 K everything stops moving – you can’t actually get to 0 K and it’s called absolute zero.

    • Photo: Ashley Cadby

      Ashley Cadby answered on 28 Jun 2012:

      I think the coolest experiment at the moment is called STORM, it stands for Stocastic optical reconstruction micrscopy and it allows us to see all the single molecules we want in a single bacteria. It has an optical resolution 10X better than a normal micrscope.

    • Photo: SarahJayne Boulton

      SarahJayne Boulton answered on 28 Jun 2012:

      I think my coolest experiments is when I get to go play downstairs in Nanoland.

      I was part of a team that developed a new kind of nanosensor for free radicals, called a PEBBLE, it kid of kicks around inside of cells shining out light according to how stresses out the cell is. I make these tiny tiny sensors by hand in a thing called a Rotovaporator.

      At the same time, I take some ultra pure gold electrodes and stick down a protein called cytochrome c, it’s red and the stuff I use comes from horse’s hearts. Whe I stick this to the gold electrode it means I can find free radicals as the flow from the stressed out cells and get an idea of who the cells are communicating with each other.

      SO THEN, I get cell cells, put the nanosensors inside them, then put the cells on an electrode and monitor them from the inside and the outside all at the same time!! Its brilliant!!

      I’ll try and post some pictures up to show you all what it looks like.

      OH BTW:: Free radicals are like really reactive little molecular bullies that kind of break up your DNA and stress out your cells. In small quantities they’re really useful so sending messages, but too many just kills everything.

    • Photo: Paige Brown

      Paige Brown answered on 29 Jun 2012:

      I like the experiment where I am hooking up electrodes and heartrate monitors to people while they watch scary documentaries or movie clips about environmental problems like global warming! We can see if people get scared or anxious when watching this type of media content, and if fear appeals work for making people care more about their environments, or if it just makes them scared and not want to do anything for their environments! I do survey research on students, asking them questions and seeing what their responses are, and looking at this data to see if we can design better communication messages and systems to help people understand global environmental problems and the need for action.

      I also did cool experiments with putting glowing markers inside of cancer cells, to see where drugs and nanoparticles traveled around the cancer cells and if the drugs made it to the targets that we wanted the drugs to go to!!!

    • Photo: Gemma Staite

      Gemma Staite answered on 1 Jul 2012:

      I don’t really do experiments. I perform set tests based on what organisms grow. I quite like it when an anaerobe needs identifying though. It requires several tests and it is something that we don’t have to do very often

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