• Question: What break throughs have you made (if any) and how do you think it was able to impact the efforts of reducing the impact of climate change ?

    Asked by Luke.N on 14 Jun 2023.
    • Photo: Cat Cowie

      Cat Cowie answered on 14 Jun 2023:

      Science is really a team effort, with everyone slowly building up our knowledge of the world, and sharing it so that ourselves and others can use it to learn something else that is new. This can happen quickly or slowly and lead to breakthroughs that many people have contributed to. I have published my research about how to resolve landscape-scale problems like wildlife diseases or natural flood management, and others have used what I found to support their own research, and improvements are being made all the time in these areas which help us increase biodiversity and carbon storage. It’s all hands on deck to do whatever we can to reduce the impact of climate change.

    • Photo: Amy Stockwell

      Amy Stockwell answered on 14 Jun 2023:

      Sadly none. I help people to understand what their most impactful processes or products are. Then they can invest in the right technologies to reduce their impact in a time and cost effective manner.

    • Photo: Paul Waldron

      Paul Waldron answered on 15 Jun 2023:

      Whilst I haven’t invented a new technology or discovered anything new, I have helped a huge number of people live in lower energy homes, study in Schools and University’s that have a smaller carbon footprint, swapped gas boilers for low carbon technology and helped people charge their electric vehicles using solar electrical power rather than burning fossil fuels to create the electricity.
      There are so many scientists and inventors that have created awesome new technology’s, I’m just trying to help people know about it and use it.

    • Photo: John Grasmeder

      John Grasmeder answered on 16 Jun 2023:

      I’ve been involved in developing materials which are very strong and lightweight and can replace metals in aircraft and cars. Saving weight helps reduce CO2 emissions.
      We’ve also developed a new type of wire and cable insulation which is used in the motors for electric cars so that they can be lighter in weight but deliver the same power as larger electric motors.

    • Photo: Alexander De Bruin

      Alexander De Bruin answered on 16 Jun 2023:

      I helped invent something that caused the coating in a catalytic converter/filter to stay stuck in place (a very elaborate type of powdered glue), which has helped the company I work for win some business and we’ll hopefully be seeing that technology in cars from next year, reducing the particles emitted by cars and trucks. More recently, I’ve helped understand some issues we were having when printing our fuel cell components, meaning that we could supply our customer with the bit that makes a fuel cell work, and therefore they could build more trucks with our product in, reducing the carbon emissions of a fleet of trucks.

    • Photo: Ferran Brosa Planella

      Ferran Brosa Planella answered on 16 Jun 2023:

      Science is incremental most of the time (that is, progress occurs in small steps rather than big breakthroughs). It is also a team effort, especially when dealing with complicated challenges. So my research has not had any big breakthroughs, but it is contributing (jointly with many other people’s research) into better understanding how batteries work so we can build better batteries and use them more efficiently.

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