• Question: does your work affect normal lives, and if so, how?

    Asked by to Daren, Lynne, Phillip, Simon on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Daren Fearon

      Daren Fearon answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      I was asked a similar question yesterday so I will give a similar answer if thats ok? 🙂

      Antibiotic resistance is becoming a big problem for all of mankind. Without effective ways of treating bacterial infections people could die from very simple things that we could previously cure. My work involves trying to find new ways to kill bacteria so that we can continue to treat infections and live happy, healthy, normal lives 🙂

    • Photo: Lynne Thomas

      Lynne Thomas answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      My work is all about making materials and understanding how they work and what they could be used for. If you think about it, life has been revolutionised by computers and by things like mobile phones. The size and weight of the battery that powers your phone has decreased significantly and we now have touch screens which mean we don’t need a keyboard any more and we can have very large screens. These improvements have only been possible because of the scientists who have made new materials and found new ways to put them into devices. And it is an understanding of the atoms and molecules that has allowed us to make these advances. So hopefully the work that I am doing will result in even better devices in the future. But not just in terms of electronics, but also as sensors that can maybe detect very low amounts of dangerous materials in the atmosphere or in ways to improve the way that medicines can be absorbed into your body. I’m involved in a very big project which will be looking at these problems and many others and its very exciting to think about what we might find out! Its not going to be an immediate effect though, but hopefully in 10-20 years time, my research will have helped us to make some significant progress in making new types of materials. One of our aims is to make colour changing paint for your car so you can choose the colour by your mood – wouldn’t it be good if we could do that?!

    • Photo: Simon Redfern

      Simon Redfern answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      Some of my work is helping to explain why we can measure Earth’s climate, stretching back millions of years, from records locked into the shells of plankton, corals and shellfish. These measurements help us understand how climate changes in the past have affected the planet, and help make predictions for future climate change more accurate.

      At a completely different level, I am also looking at the properties of minerals deep in the interior of planets, at very high temperatures and pressures. One of these projects is actually part-funded by Rolls Royce, because the properties of metals in the core of the Earth are similar in some ways to the properties of the turbine blades of jet engines, which have to perform at extremely high temperatures, approaching their melting point!

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      At the moment my work doesn’t effect your normal life today. It might help to change the cars we all drive in the future, but that’s not likely to be for another few decades.
      The great thing about science is the things you find out accidentally on the way that are really useful for real life. For example Tim Berners Lee invented the world wide web whilst working at CERN. You can’t really say that the work done at CERN has an effect on the life of the everyday person, but where would we be today without the world wide web?

    • Photo: Phillip Manning

      Phillip Manning answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      Many of us teach at Universities. We teach undergraduates on degree courses and supervise postgraduate on their MSc and PhD research. All these folks end-up working and contributing to multiple facets of life. My team is also broad and diverse and works on topics from medicine to materials and from imaging to cell biology. The research that we generate informs multiple disciplines that impact upon our daily lives. Our latest work on bone-healing in living and extinct animals will help us understand past and present processes associated with this critical function….we have many such outputs, that i would happily talk about and come and give a lecture at your school.

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