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Asked by tararyan to Andrew, Aggelos, Eileen, Naomi, Shane on 11 Nov 2012. This question was also asked by leahhart, ciaracarroll, jasond98, thedazinator, hashtag.
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Andrew Jackson answered on 11 Nov 2012:
Hi,
Hands down, the computer is definitely my favorite invention of all time. I would be lost without it for both science reasons and because i spend loads of time playing computer games and chatting with friends on facebook and twitter. I use computers in work all the time as I build computer programmes to understand how animals like ants coooperate to find food, why some animals have evolved larger brains that others, and how flocks of birds collectively avoid being eaten by predators.
cheers
andew
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Eileen Diskin answered on 11 Nov 2012:
I think electricity is mine! I can’t imagine life without it. First of all, because all of the things that we all like to use on a daily basis that are made possible by electricity (like TV, phones, and doing things on the computer). Well, and like right now I am answering some of these questions this while I cook dinner – and that would be tricky to do by candlelight without burning everything! (But honestly I’m not so good at multitasking so I hope I don’t burn everything anyway, since I’m doing this at the same time!)
But electricity has made lots of other things possible, like in hospitals a lot of treatments need electricity to work and make people better. So it does lots of good things for us! Just as long as we also remember that its good to turn off things like lights and our computers when we’re not using them, since thats not very good for the environment! 😉
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Naomi Elster answered on 12 Nov 2012:
Penicillin. First off, it’s a great story – the scientist who was too hungry to care about his food being mouldy and miraculously got better after eating it. It’s a great example of great science – while some people claim Alexander Fleming was lucky, and that he discovered penicillin by accident, what made him a true scientist is that he wanted to know why he got better after eating mould, and spent a lot of time researching it. Penicillin became known as “the wonder drug of the twenty-first century” and a lot of killer diseases that used to devastate entore communities (like tubercolosis, for example, which was especially prevalent in Dublin), are now entorely curable and no cause for fear anymore.
It shows how big a difference that medicine can make and that even if something looks hopeless now, the next “wonder drug” could be just around the corner.
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Aggelos Zacharopoulos answered on 12 Nov 2012:
@tararyan
My favourite invention is the photovoltaic materials. They are materials that convert the sunlight into electricity wthout polluting the environment, making any noise or having any moving parts at all. They work even on a cloudy day! You may know them as solar panels and you can put them on the roof or the walls your house to help use less electricity from the grid and pay lower bills.
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