• Question: Whatb is the most interesting experiment you have done so far?

    Asked by nazia1999 to Catherine, Leila, Adam, Karen, Nazim on 19 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by funkymonkey, lmcglone19, igloo23.
    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      I think it is interesting, but it is also kind of gross and takes a long time so it can be boring waiting for it to happen…

      I want to see how quickly things rot under different conditions (underwater, in the air, without any oxygen) so I am killing lots of different things, like bacteria, plants, and squishy animals, and leaving them for days and weeks while they rot away. Then I take pictures of them and try to work out what is decaying and if there would be a fossil left.

      It really smells too!

    • Photo: Catherine Rix

      Catherine Rix answered on 20 Mar 2012:

      I was part of a team of students who built and flew an experiment to look for microrganisms in the stratosphere. We didn’t find any but we learnt a lot about how easy it is to contaminate your experiment, even if you are being very careful!

    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 20 Mar 2012:

      I’ve done lots of random experiments over the course of my science career. They’ve all been interesting in their own way.

      I measured the tuning of piano strings and found out that if you tune one by ear it’s actually not in perfect mathematical tuning. If you did it to the equations it would sound horrible! Our ears and brains actually like a little bit of inharmonicity.

      I also had to measure how fast some propellers were moving (I was building a Mars-plane). To do this i had to make use of something called the wagon wheel effect, which you can see on car wheels – when they move at a certain speed the wheels don’t look like they’re moving, or can even move backwards.

      I had to drive a strobe light in a small room (disco!) and watch to see when the propellers looked like they had stopped, which gave me their rotation rate.

      I have also managed to get Lego into quite a lot of my experiments, which is cool 😀

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