• Question: What is the most interesting fact you have learnt during your studies ?

    Asked by anon-326076 on 16 May 2022.
    • Photo: Algernon Bloom

      Algernon Bloom answered on 16 May 2022: last edited 16 May 2022 4:18 pm

      You can make a mathematical model that shows how the population of rabbits and foxes grows and shrinks. This same model can also be applied to how your immune system and a tumour interact.
      I find it so interesting that there is such a close like on different scales.

    • Photo: Karin Purshouse

      Karin Purshouse answered on 17 May 2022:

      That you can paint chromosomes and look at them under a microscope. There is just something absolutely amazing about looking at chromosomes and using some science wizardry to make them different colours so you can see which one is which! It’s important too, for some of my experiments, to know how many of a certain chromosome there are in each cell (in cancer cells, you can have more than two copies!)

    • Photo: David MacLean

      David MacLean answered on 17 May 2022:

      If you add 10mL of ethanol (alcohol) and 10mL of water together, you don’t get 20mL of the mixture! You actually get less than 20mL because of the way water bonds. Water bonds in large hexagons with hydrogen bonding between each of them and when ethanol is added, it breaks some of these bonds and means that the water molecules can get packed in together closer, which reduces the volume!

      So in this very specific case: 10mL plus 10mL does not equal 20mL!

      Weird.

    • Photo: Sophie Richardson

      Sophie Richardson answered on 20 May 2022:

      I find it interesting that there are so many different molecules in the blood that we can look at. Sometimes these molecules, like proteins and genetic material, are in the blood at really low levels. The amazing technologies we have today can help us find these rare molecules and understand what they are telling us about an individual’s cancer. We think that these molecules can tell us if a person has cancer before it can be seen on a scan, which is incredible.

    • Photo: Iain Tullis

      Iain Tullis answered on 7 Jun 2022:

      You can have a red light so bright that it is blue.

Comments

  • Photo: Emer

    Emer commented on :

    There is radiation all around us, even in the food we eat (bananas are famously one of the more radioactive foods!), and there’s a background level of radiation that everyone is exposed to on a daily basis which largely comes from naturally occurring elements in our environment. A lot of people think radiation sounds scary and get worried when doctors have to use X-rays to look inside them when they have a broken bone or other health issue, but when people understand how common it is it can make them a lot less worried because they get that being exposed to little amounts of radiation can be safe when there are professionals controlling it making sure it that you don’t get exposed to any more of it than you need to be.