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Asked by RW family to Omur, Maddison, Jimi, Hayley, Chris on 11 Mar 2016.
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Jimi Wills answered on 11 Mar 2016:
Depends on the stuff. A lot of the stuff I make is solutions. I buy all the ingredients from online science shops and them mix them up in the right way to make the solutions I need. The solutions are designed to do things like get all the proteins out of cells, or separate molecules so we can study them one by one.
Separating molecules is tricky. I use a thing called chromatography. I pack little microscoping balls into a tube about the size of a hair. Then in one solutions the molecules stick to the balls. I use a special pump that pumps the solution from a bottle. But the pump can also gradually change from one bottle to another. So in the other bottle I have a solution that the molecules come unstuck from the balls. As the solution flowing over the balls changes from one bottle to the other, molecules come off the balls one by one… e.g. all the sucrose (sugar) molecules come off at once, but at a different time from all the other molecules.
This means I can look at the molecules one by one in the mass spectrometer.
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Maddison Coke answered on 11 Mar 2016:
In science “stuff” can mean a lot of things! I make tiny structures, to make these I heat up metals till they are nearly liquid and then direct the evaporated metal to my sample. This is all done in a big metal box which has had all the air removed so I can get very pure samples but also I can put them down one layer of molecules at a time which makes it interesting. I have flaps over the metals so I can open and close them very quickly and create sandwichs of very thin materials and thats when you start to make fun materials…or “stuff”
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Omur Tastan answered on 11 Mar 2016:
Drosophila 🙂 fruit flies, we make them fat and the dissect them…sounds very cruel now that I said it. ?
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Hayley Moulding answered on 16 Mar 2016:
I use little electrodes to make my study!! They are put on peoples head and they measure the activity of the brain! It is really cool because we can ask people to do different things and see how the activity in their brain changes!
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