• Question: What is your most interesting find?

    Asked by push519doum to Victoria, Sujit B, Ollie T, Liam H, Claire SH, Caroline, artemiseales, Andrew M, Andrew Gartside on 17 Dec 2024. This question was also asked by need520fops, nest520agee.
    • Photo: Artemis Eales

      Artemis Eales answered on 17 Dec 2024:

      The most interesting thing I have found is that seaweed grows faster than plants on land do! I found that out when I was reading about green seaweed in industry

    • Photo: Claire Sycamore-Howe

      Claire Sycamore-Howe answered on 17 Dec 2024:

      This had been done before and I was trying to repeat (a lot of science is like this), I managed to genetically engineer some E.coli bacteria to produce a protein I needed called Apoferritin. That was great when I got it to work! It took about 3 months to cut the plasmid (bacteria DNA) in the right place, then insert the gene, get the bacteria to make it, then extract it.

      It was very satisfying when I had my protein at the end. But it took a lot of trial and error and there were a lot of issues like the DNA going in the wrong place, or it going in the right place and then the bacteria digesting it when they made it.

    • Photo: Andrew McDowall

      Andrew McDowall answered on 17 Dec 2024:

      When at university it was that some clusters didn’t behave as they were supposed to according to the theories at the time. I’m not sure that there’s been a better explanation since, still seems to be an open question as to why they misbahaved.

      In work it was that there was a whole extra population of particles in one of our common slurries that everyone else had missed, but which were critical to the performance of our products. Now we know they’re there we’ve been able to make better product, more easily and with much less waste. Whole new product lines from a simple observation and some thought and investigation.

    • Photo: Caroline Roche

      Caroline Roche answered on 20 Dec 2024:

      I once found some fossilised remains of plants while I was on holiday, that was interesting.
      While at work, my most interesting find is probably related to finding better ways to program something. We once reduced supplied code by 60% and still had it function – which was interesting to see how much code wasn’t actually necessary for what we wanted to use it for.

Comments

  • Photo: melissaupjohn

    melissaupjohn commented on :

    I studied the behaviour of racehorses managed by two different trainers to see whether the way they were cared for affected the likelihood of them showing stereotypical behaviours in their stable. (stereotypical behaviours in animals are interpreted as meaning that they are stressed and indicates poor welfare) My research showed that more horses in the yard where they were kept in their stable all day/night apart from going out for their daily exercise showed stereotypical behaviours than in the yard where horses were taken out to eat grass/move around freely in a field for 3-4 hours each day (and then spent the rest of the day/night in their stable) While this not unexpected, up until then nobody had done the detailed study in these kind of horses so we were able to confirm this (science is often about testing your assumptions, to see if they are actually correct or not). We demonstrated that, if possible, racehorses should be turned out to graze as part of their daily routine (of course this assumes that the trainer has fields available to do this, which is not necessarily always the case)