• Question: what will your work help us to discover that we don't already know?

    Asked by lethalbadger34 to Duncan, Kiran, Paul, Sarah, Sharon on 15 Mar 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Duncan Murdock

      Duncan Murdock answered on 15 Mar 2010:

      We really don’t know why animals first started to grow shells and skeletons, they’re useful for lots of things but which reasons caused them to evolve first? Also, lots of these really old fossils are very strange and we don’t know what kind of animal they belonged to, so I’m hoping to help us understand that better and help to draw the tree of life.

    • Photo: Paul Stevenson

      Paul Stevenson answered on 15 Mar 2010:

      I do “basic science” – trying to discover new things in nuclear physics. For example, I recently made a prediction about how the forces between protons and neutrons might lead to new “superheavy” elements – new elements in the periodic table that are much heavier than the known ones. That would be really exciting (to me!), and I might even be allowed to pick the name of the element 🙂

      On the other hand, so many things have come from basic nuclear physics research that were not planned – they just come about as spin-offs of the curiosity to understand nature better. For instance, radiotherapy treatment for cancer and the world wide web were both invented as by-products of people trying to understand nuclear physics better.

    • Photo: Kiran Meekings

      Kiran Meekings answered on 15 Mar 2010:

      We hardly know anything about cancer – everyday scientists like the ones on here make small steps to discovering more about cancer. I help turn those steps into making drugs that will be used to treat people. Learning what causes cancer is a tricky business as each of us has about 25,000 genes. You need about 7 of those genes to go wrong to turn a cell into a cancerous cell (which might then make a tumour). So that means you can have approximately 1.5 x 10^30 different types of cancer using those numbers…. so my work is helping to work out what drugs will work in what types of cancer.

    • Photo: Sharon Sneddon

      Sharon Sneddon answered on 15 Mar 2010:

      When embryos are at a very early stage, between 1 and 10 days old, no one really knows what happens inside them. Sadly, a lot of pregnancies fail at that stage as the embryos do not implant, or attach properly into the mother.

      Embryos are very hard to study at that stage because obviously they are inside the mothers womb (uterus) and rather tricky to get at! By using a combination of embryos grown in an incubator and human embryonic stem cells, we can try to get to the bottom of what is going on and make it easier for some people who are having problems having babies.

    • Photo: Sarah Mount

      Sarah Mount answered on 15 Mar 2010:

      Hopefully, new ways to create software for very large, complex systems where very many computers are connected together. The only system we have like that that works is the Internet, and one reason the Internet works is that so many companies and engineers are involved in fixing it when it goes wrong! In the future, it is likely that thousands of small computers will be embedded in everyday objects like clothing and around your homes. With so many small computers it won’t be possible to have an engineer come and fix them when they go wrong, so it’s important that they can all work together without humans getting involved. No one quite knows how to do that yet.

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