• Question: Have you ever discovered something new

    Asked by anon-357545 on 15 Mar 2023.
    • Photo: Andrew Wood

      Andrew Wood answered on 15 Mar 2023:

      Discovering something new is a really interesting question! When scientists work on things they are often working on topics that we know very little about, and as such we often find out potentially new things. We then have to do lots of work to check that what we have found is really new and correct, and then we write papers to share our findings with other scientists and the whole world!

    • Photo: Alexandra Milliken

      Alexandra Milliken answered on 15 Mar 2023:

      My lab have discovered quite a few things to do with plant interactions, which have been published in scientific journals such as New Phytologist and the Plant Journal.

    • Photo: Alison Tidy

      Alison Tidy answered on 15 Mar 2023:

      As a scientist we are discovering new things all of the time, the main part of my research is discovering how pollen is made and we have discovered a lot of new proteins and what role they have in this process. As Andrew mentioned we have to do a lot of reading around the subject, lots of lab groups are working on solving problems throughout the world and we therefore need to know what they are doing, and when we are working on something similar we try and work together. All new findings once we have confirmed them are shared with other scientists through scientific papers published in journals. This way we are always building on knowledge to discover something new.

    • Photo: Martin Vickers

      Martin Vickers answered on 15 Mar 2023:

      Discovering completely new things is something that scientists do find exciting, however there are other discoveries to be made too. Such as finding a new way of doing something, applying existing techniques to new applications or making previously difficult tasks easier/faster to help scientists make even more discoveries.

      It’s easier than you think to make a novel contribution to the scientific community.

    • Photo: Ian Adams

      Ian Adams answered on 20 Mar 2023:

      We work on plant viruses and in recent years have discovered quite a few new viruses. Some quite damaging to the plants we find them in, others seem to have little effect. Naming my first new one was quite exciting.

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