• Question: what is your favourite experiment

    Asked by anon-207577 to William, Silvia, Scott, Oliver, Natalie, Michelle, Lowri on 5 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Natalie Lamb

      Natalie Lamb answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      My favourite experiment I like to show school children is getting them to take a sample of drinking water from their school and testing how much chlorine there is in the water. I add a white powder and if there is a lot of chlorine, the sample turns bright pink. I then put it in a little machine to see how much of a colour change there has been, how much chlorine there is.

    • Photo: Silvia Imberti

      Silvia Imberti answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      Great question, I do love to talk about experiments! In some of my favourite experiments, I do get to use a cryostat, that is like a fridge that goes to really low temperatures such as -200 degrees. In order to do that we use liquid nitrogen, such as in here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enEtTV-FyCU

    • Photo: Lowri Evans

      Lowri Evans answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      I do my experiments on the computer. So I like to test for patterns and associations in data such as between temperature and body size or latitude and body size. Typically, in warmer temperatures (or lower latitudes e.g. tropics) the body size of a marine invertebrate (animal with no back bone) will be small compared to if the same animal was found at colder temperatures (or higher latitudes e.g. polar regions).

    • Photo: Michelle Valkanas

      Michelle Valkanas answered on 6 Mar 2019:

      Nice question! My favourite research experiment I do is with gene expression. We take all of the genetic material and isolate the RNA. RNA is what makes all of the proteins. DNA is used to make RNA. Using fluorescence and a laser we can measure how much a gene is being expressed and as a result how much protein is being made.

      When I visit students I like to make density rainbows like described here:

      Seven-Layer Density Column

      Because different liquids have different densities (more stuff shoved in a tight space). The liquids do not mix together, but lay on top of each other. This makes a really cool rainbow! You can do it with things you have at home like water, oil, and dish soap.

    • Photo: Scott Graham

      Scott Graham answered on 6 Mar 2019:

      oh that is a tough question, there is loads of different types of experiments I like to do. I do like working with the bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa (pronounce it by saying the words sue dough moan as followed by the words air ooh jin oh sa). I like this bacteria as it grows a green colour (and sometimes metallic and shiny) but it glows under a UV light which I think is cool

    • Photo: Oliver Andrews

      Oliver Andrews answered on 12 Mar 2019:

      I run experiments on computers like Lowri. One of my favourite experiments is to try to simulate a “snowball earth” which is when ice covers the whole planet all the way down to the tropics. These events are thought to have happened during the Neoproterozoic (almost one billion years ago), so trying to figure out what caused them is really fascinating!

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