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Asked by anon-351347 on 13 Mar 2023.
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Joshua Bray answered on 13 Mar 2023:
As a Chemist, I’m of course going to tell you that chemistry is the bomb. Specifically process chemistry. I spent the majority of my time at Uni studying very minute detail of how reactions work, but since moving to industry I’m more interested in the engineering aspect of chemistry. I find crystallisation and the effects of mixing and seeding fascinating. You can try this at home with a simple “crystal growing” science kit, and it will introduce you to the ideas of “supersaturation”, the importance of seeding and how selective crystallisation can be. How is it that you get a single coloured crystal from a mix of loads of different coloured chemicals?!
Outside chemistry, I find gene editing and “CRISPR” technology amazing. It’s like we’re living in a real world Marvel film!
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Graeme Dykes answered on 13 Mar 2023:
Every scientist finds their own work and the work of others in the same part of science, exciting.
Always something new. Sometimes proof positive sometimes negative. Some people think that only successful experiments should be shared but we learn a lot from the things which do not work.
If you were building the first wheels and your friend had tried square ones but showed that they weren’t good, yo wouldn’t waste time on that idea but move onto round ones instead.Pure abstract science can feel remote from the World around us. Not every piece of science should have an immediate practical goal. The discovery of the structure of atoms is a a bit of a curiosity to the general public but it was a big breakthrough and it led to where we are today. Without it there would be no computers!
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Martin McCoustra answered on 13 Mar 2023:
There’s a lot of exciting stuff in the scientific world. It just depends on your interests in finding it. I find the whole question of where did we come from and is there life out there immensely interesting as the evidence is that the chemistry that went into hleping form the Solar System is pretty much the same everywhere in the Milky Way… So there’s life out there and we’ve just got to find evidence for that!
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Christy Sadler answered on 13 Mar 2023:
There are so many exciting things going on in science (I would recommend listening to podcasts or reading some science magazines/websites like New Scientist).
I find biochemistry technology and science really interesting! The Chemistry Nobel Prize this year went to something called ‘click’ chemistry and the scientists were able to do really complicated chemical reactions in a living cell which I think is really cool! -
Claire Sycamore-Howe answered on 14 Mar 2023:
There’s so much exciting things in science! Doing some postgrad work at university I was looking at antibiotics, and did you know that some of our commonly used antibiotics come from soil bacteria! Different bacteria species have evolved to produce these chemicals in “survival of the fittest” and to try and kill off other competing bacteria species in the soil where they live, but we can use them to kill off bacterial infections that make us ill.
Chemists are trying to find new bacteria and make the chemicals in the lab, or scale them up to manufacturer. I think that’s very exciting and fascinating! There’s a lot happening to try and combat “anti microbial resistance”, where our antibiotics and drugs stop working to kill bacteria, and there’s lots of innovation and cool science happening in that space
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