• Question: what i the most interesting and funny experiment you have ever done?

    Asked by louistaylor1 to Emma, Jen, Joseph, Michael, Mona on 21 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by submarine3, madscientist9445.
    • Photo: Jen Gupta

      Jen Gupta answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      The work that I’m doing at the moment is like one long experiment so I’m not going to count this. I think one of the most interesting experiments that I did in university was when I got to go to Jodrell Bank observatory with my lab partner and we used a 7 meter diameter radio telescope there (you can see a live webcam of the telescope here http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/webcam/7m.html). We took observations measuring how fast gas was moving in the nearest spiral galaxy to us called Andromeda or M31. What you find is that the gas in the outside of the galaxy is moving around the galaxy faster than you would think, based on the amount of stuff (mass) that you can see in the galaxy. This either means that our understanding of physics is wrong (unlikely) or that there is matter in the outer parts of the galaxy that we can’t see – dark matter. This experiment has been done lots of times before by other people but it was really exciting to do it ourselves and get the results.

      Not really an experiment but last year we put flowers into liquid nitrogen so that they froze and then smashed them! That was really fun and funny 😀

    • Photo: Michael Taggart

      Michael Taggart answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      The most interesting one is now an experiment we actually repeat a lot (with small variations) as it became an important finding. When we first tried it, we basically were interested in how the ion Ca increased and decreased inside cells of a blood vessel. It had been known since 1965 that if you stripped away the membrane around all smooth muscle cells of a tissue like a blood vessel – in a similar kind of way to how you use washing up liquid to get rid of grease on a plate – you the experimenter could then control some of the components that fed inside the cells. It happened to be that when you changed the amount of Ca ions then the muscle tissue contracted. However, nearly 40 years later we still didn’t really know if this happened in a real unaltered blood vessel that you hadn’t mucked about with by removing cell membranes. So we managed to put a dye inside the cells and this dye would emit a different colour of light when it bound to Ca ions. So, if Ca ions entered the cells, we’d see more of this light using a fandangled microscope. Well, when we added a drug to contract the blood vessel, we indeed saw it become narrower (constrict) and we did see the cells emit al this new light. The really interesting bit was what we didn’t expect – that the cells didn’t all react together but the Ca levels repeatedly moved up and down even though the blood vessel was remaining narrowed. So there were all these flashes of light going up and down in the cells. We weren’t the first to see this (but one of the first few labs) but it was an amazing thing to see at first hand as it completely changed how we think these Ca ions control a blood vessels motion.
      The funniest experiment? That would be when I witnessed my old supervisor eating a bit of frozen aorta (the biggest blood vessel in the body) from a sheep! You might hear and think that all scientists are a wee bit mad and he was!

    • Photo: Emma Bennett

      Emma Bennett answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      An experiment I’m doing at the moment is really interesting because it will help answer some important questions about plant death. I’ve found a variety of oilseed rape which will suddenly die after it has produced its last flower. It can look really healthy on Friday evening and when you come back Monday morning it’s completely dead and before you ask this isn’t because someone has forgotten to water it. To try and work out what’s going on I’m doing some grafting experiments, this is where a different variety of oilseed rape is attached to my sudden death plant to see if it can stop the plant dying so quickly. Afraid that I haven’t got any results from this just yet but it’s really exciting because it might tell us about plant death signals, something scientists have been looking for for ages but never found.

      I once did an experiment called the i-pod experiment where we looked at seed development in the 9th pod on a stem. The main reason for choosing the 9th pod was just to call it the i-pod (if the first pod is the a-pod, the second b-pod, then the 9th is the i-pod) as someone dared me to see if I could get the word i-pod into my work since my research is all about pods!

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