• Question: have you made a scientific discovery

    Asked by 676cars46 on 21 Sep 2016.
    • Photo: Hayley Moulding

      Hayley Moulding answered on 21 Sep 2016:


      Not yet – but I am hoping too! Maybe not an ‘eureka!’ moment but more of a discovery which could help families and their children to sleep better!!

    • Photo: Joanna Bagniewska

      Joanna Bagniewska answered on 21 Sep 2016:


      I discovered that mink (small, ferret-like animals) can dive up to 80 times in a row in winter, in icy water. If that’s not impressive, what is?

    • Photo: Melanie Zimmer

      Melanie Zimmer answered on 21 Sep 2016:


      Hi 676cars46,

      Not yet, unfortunately. Like Hayley, I would hope to discover something to make people’s life better and easier in some way. 🙂

      Melanie

    • Photo: Katie Mahon

      Katie Mahon answered on 21 Sep 2016:


      Not personally no! Maybe in future I’ll invent a cool & useful product 🙂

    • Photo: Rebecca Dewey

      Rebecca Dewey answered on 21 Sep 2016:


      I’ve discovered a few little things. For example, I discovered that a drug called a beta-blocker can change activity in the brain. When people were shown photographs that would make them feel an emotion (e.g. pics of cute animals, babies, really yummy food, but also crime, starving people and people in pain), this uses parts of the brain called the limbic system. We can change how much the limbic system helps process something by giving someone a beta-blocker. This means that we might be able to prevent someone from having a long-term psychological illness like post-traumatic stress disorder if we give the beta-blocker immediately after they have suffered a distressing emotional episode.

    • Photo: Ian Hands-Portman

      Ian Hands-Portman answered on 21 Sep 2016:


      I’ve discovered several new species of virus that live on bacteria around deep sea hydrothermal vents – practical applications, um none; but it’s great seeing something no-one has ever seen before

    • Photo: Ollie Brown

      Ollie Brown answered on 21 Sep 2016:


      Technically, yes, but nothing terribly exciting I’m afraid! Well, unless you happen to be as interested in strongly interacting photonic lattice systems as my supervisor is, anyway.

      Scientific progress tends to happen in many small steps, even something big like the discovery of the Higgs boson happened as a result of many, many, many experiments carried out over decades, and with work from a LOT of people.

    • Photo: Evan Keane

      Evan Keane answered on 22 Sep 2016:


      Yes. I have been lucky enough to make many new discoveries. These have been discoveries of new stars, in particular a weird type of zombie star called pulsars. I have found many of those. I have also found several explosions in space – somethings called “fast radio bursts” – nobody knows what they are yet!!

      It is a huge buzz when you make a discovery. Amazing. When you are the only person on the planet to know something that nobody has ever known before. Amazing. But working as a scientist is not jam-packed with discoveries and Eureka moments. Day-to-day it is hard work and mostly you find out what doesn’t work (if we knew the right thing to do or look for it would mean we already had discovered it!). But that is an important part of the process. I think it was Einstein that said science was 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.

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