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Asked by anon-284635 on 4 Mar 2021. This question was also asked by anon-289214.
Question: What is the coolest thing that you have ever found
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Nicola Morrice answered on 4 Mar 2021:
I work on diabetes and I used to work on something called vitamin A, which is found in foods such as carrots, and is really important to keep the body healthy. I wanted to know if you could help to treat diabetes with vitamin A. So after a lot of hard work, I found out a kind of vitamin A can help to control how much of a protein that is changed by diabetes is made in the body. This was really cool because me and the people that I worked with were the first people ever to show that this was happening, and it could help to make people who have diabetes better.
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Karen Burstow answered on 16 Mar 2021:
As part of my current job I get to look at lots of different things under different microscopes to see what they look like at very high magnifications! I find this really interesting, for example seeing what an insect looks like – where you can see the fine structures their made from!
Try googling ‘insect SEM images’ to see for yourself! SEM stands for scanning electron microscope and uses electrons instead of light (like a regular microscope) so you can see even higher magnifications.
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Jess Buddle answered on 17 Mar 2021:
Hey! In university i was studying a bacteria called S. aureus and how it can survive on our skin even though we release antimicrobial fats to kill it 🙂
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Chris commented on :
When I was studying at university I got to work with the police in a very interesting case. They had stopped a parcel which was sent from overseas which contained a bottle capsules full of white powder – and when they did their testing it didn’t match anything they had ever found before. With some help from another university, we eventually figured out what it was.
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After we figured out what we thought it was, I actually got to synthesise it. The material I made matched the seized capsules in every test we did so we were confident that we had figured out what it was. We then got to do a variety of other studies and published the results in a scientific journal – it was super cool!
Callum commented on :
When I was looking for mosquitoes in Australia I came across the larva of a very special mosquito species called the “Elephant mosquito”. They’re called this because they are much bigger than normal mosquitoes and have a curved proboscis kind of like an elephant trunk. They’re special because they don’t drink blood as adults and instead only drink nectar from flowers.
Normally mosquito larvae only eat algae or bacteria in water and so the females need to drink blood to get enough protein to make eggs as adults. But the elephant mosquito is different: their larvae are so big they eat other mosquito larvae! This gives them enough protein to lay eggs when they grow into adults. They are also a really beautiful purple colour as larvae and a shiny blue colour when they are adults. It’s surprising a mosquito can be so colourful!