• Question: Have you discovered anything that has never been made?

    Asked by anon-244324 to Ondrej, Jordan, Eleanor, Ed, Christine, Alice on 10 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Eleanor Jones

      Eleanor Jones answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      Not yet, but there’s definitely still time!

    • Photo: Edward Banks

      Edward Banks answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      Experiments in my lab have made some fun discoveries- like that life is mostly unaffected by levels of radiation lower than normal background radiation. It doesn’t grow better, it isn’t hurt, just the same.
      This is a bit of a counter-intuitive result, as we know that lots of radiation is bad for you, and the more you get the worse it is. So you might think that the less radiation you have, the better it is for you. But this is only true as far down as normal background; below that it doesn’t matter!

    • Photo: Jordan McElwee

      Jordan McElwee answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      I’ve never discovered something which has not been seen (though my experiment did before I joined). However, in our lab we did build a new light source which uses new technology, so I’m going to say that counts!

    • Photo: Christine Beavers

      Christine Beavers answered on 12 Mar 2020:

      yes! When I was doing my PhD, I discovered a fullerene that broke the rules! Fullerenes are carbon cages, made up of hexagons and pentagons of carbon. The most common one is C60, which looks like a traditional football. The fullerene rules, when I started my PhD were that pentagons were always surrounded by hexagons. I had collected data on a C84 cage which hadn’t previously been seen. I started to build my 3D model, and then I saw two pentagons together. “Naw, that can’t be right!” I mumbled as I trashed that model and started again. Sure enough, the next model started to indicate the pentagons together. This time I decided to give it a chance, and continue building the model. The model was really great fit to the data, and the two pentagons made sense once it was complete. It was a very exciting time in my life! You can see the resulting publication if you copy this link: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ja063636k

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