• Question: Do you do much science experiments

    Asked by micheal to Aggelos, Andrew, Eileen, Naomi, Shane on 13 Nov 2012.
    • Photo: Andrew Jackson

      Andrew Jackson answered on 13 Nov 2012:

      I do a lot of experiments, but i tend to run them on my computer. I write and build computer programs, that are a bit like computer games, and use them to understand how animals interact with each other. One of these is a program that lets me explore how different behaviours of following your neighbour, can lead to more food being found by vultures. This also lets me explore how we can help vulture populations that are going extinct by creating vulture restaurants to feed them – they love dead zebras!

    • Photo: Shane Bergin

      Shane Bergin answered on 13 Nov 2012:

      Yes. all the time. i have ideas first. then i go and test them by doing an experiment. i have to think about the meaning of the results then and work out what’s happening. they can range from being really fun to being really boring. THey are the main part of my job. When i teach i use experiments too – they are really good for explain things like – why is the sky blue, or what is an echo etc

    • Photo: Aggelos Zacharopoulos

      Aggelos Zacharopoulos answered on 13 Nov 2012:

      @micheal
      I have to run experiments in the laboratory regularly. Either for students that study in the university and need to understand how some things work or for my own research purposes. I have a big laboratory full of equipment that alllows me to investigate things that I need or want to know about solar energy. Without the laboratory it would be difficult to do my job.

    • Photo: Eileen Diskin

      Eileen Diskin answered on 14 Nov 2012:

      Some of the time! I like when I get to go to the laboratory, although I haven’t been much recently. A lot of my experiments I set up one day, and then put into an incubator (its like a warm little oven where bacteria grow well), and then I got to look at the results the next day! It was always a surprise to see if the experiment would work. (A lot of times science experiments don’t really work how you want them to).

      I think the favorite experiment I ever did was in college, when we learned how to make soap out of a bunch of different chemicals. But really, it just looked like a bunch of bubbly foam at the bottom of the beaker where we were mixing the chemicals – not like soap at all! So I snuck off to the toilets to grab a real bar of soap and put that at the bottom of the beaker instead…and my teacher and all the other students in the class just thought I did a super good job of making it 😉

    • Photo: Naomi Elster

      Naomi Elster answered on 14 Nov 2012:

      Yes, most of the time. I spend a lot of time thinking about the question I want to ask and then design an experiment or a set of experiments to answer it. Then I do the experiements. The real fun starts when I get the results and have to analyse them. Then based on the results I will do more experiements. I also have to get the same results at least three times to prove that they are the right results.

      Most of my results now are with cancer cells. I set them up in special plates and leave them to grow. Then I add different drugs in different doses to different plates and leave them in an incubator – an oven where the temperature, CO2 levels and water levels are very tightly controlled – for a few days and get the results the next week. These experiments show me which drugs work best at killing cancer cells.

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