• Question: have you ever did a science related job out of where u would normally work?

    Asked by simone2001 to Alan, Deepak, Francesca, Lilly, Nick on 10 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Deepak Kar

      Deepak Kar answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      I was went to this science fair as a judge, where school students put on their projects.

      The day started off with me looking at some of the “Physics” projects – and they ranged from super methodical to interesting to some silly ones. The winner in this category had toy cars of different shapes and sizes in a homemade wind tunnel and looked at those cars affect the wind flow. It was a pretty neat idea. After lunch, it was time to branch out to different areas – and I came across some of really eye catchings projects. One involved making a dog smell different foodstuff and record how it reacted. Another one played different sound tracks to a chicken and saw which one got it scared. There was one project where a guy poured different brands of carbonated soft drinks on animal tissue, and predicted comparatively how harmful they are depending on how much the tissue is dissolved.

    • Photo: Lilian Hunt

      Lilian Hunt answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      I’ve only really used my science knowledge outside of my work by going into schools and back to my old university to help out. I got to speak to students and help answer questions like the ones you have all asked us here, but I’ve not really done any other science work outside of my usual job.

    • Photo: Francesca Day

      Francesca Day answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      I went and did science at the Large Hadron Collider about a year and a half ago, which was really cool! The Large Hadron Collider is a machine built to slam particles into each other really, really fast. Then physicists are able to look at the particles that are created in the collision, and discover new particles like the Higgs Boson.

      When I went, they were having some problems with bits of dust falling off the machine into the beams of particles, so I was helping to fix that!

    • Photo: Alan Fitzsimmons

      Alan Fitzsimmons answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      When astronomers want to use a big telescope, they have to write an application describing what science they want to do. I sometimes have a job of working with other scientists to judge these applications, and decide who gets to use the telescopes.

    • Photo: Nick Wright

      Nick Wright answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      The great thing is about science is that it teaches you how the whole world works and it also teaches you how to investigate things. So I once worked in a restaurant (quite a famous restaurant actually) where we wanted to make a soup that had no colour but had a certain flavour so that people would be surprised when they tasted it as they wouldn’t know in advance what it would taste like. I designed a filter machine to remove the molecules in the soup that gave it colour without removing the molecules that gave it flavour. We then created an experiment to test the machine and it worked so the restaurant used it!

Comments