• Question: How can you tell if an experiment has gone wrong if there no reaction from an testers?

    Asked by navy520gout on 18 Mar 2025.
    • Photo: Ruth Augarde

      Ruth Augarde answered on 18 Mar 2025:

      That’s why scientists design their tests carefully, asking “what do we expect to happen in this experiment, and how can we measure it? What are the ways it could go wrong”

      A good example is a home test kit for something like Covid-19: the test strip will show two lines if the test is positive, and one line if it is negative. If you don’t see any lines, that means the test strip is broken or faulty in some way – this means you don’t mix up when a test is negative and when the strip is broken!

Comments

  • Photo: melissau

    melissau commented on :

    When a doctor treats a patient they’re able to check how the treatment is going by asking the patient how they’re feeling as well as running other tests to check whether the treatment is improving things. As a vet, I’m not able to ask my patient how they’re feeling, so in addition to running tests which can confirm things, I have to rely on owners being very observant and being able to tell me, based on the way their animal is behaving, whether the animal is doing better or doing worse. This can be difficult if the animal is tricky to observe (for example, if a cat goes outdoors for many hours a day, where the owner can’t see them or if the animal is good at hiding its feelings, for example, some people think that donkeys don’t feel pain but actually they are just very subtle in the ways that they show this and we don’t always pick up on those signs)