• Question: What is the craziest project you have done?

    Asked by anon-356041 to Nikolai on 22 Mar 2023.
    • Photo: Nikolai Adamski

      Nikolai Adamski answered on 22 Mar 2023:

      Crazy is something that scientists generally do not do 🙂
      Also, the definition of crazy is very subjective; what I think is fine, you might deem crazy

      Some of my projects had pretty wild logistics. I had to sample leafs and other plant organs in a regular time intervals (e.g. every 2-3 hours) for 48 hours. This was to allow me to study how the plants react to a stress over time.

      In another experiment we collected the growing tips of small plants. This means having to dissect lots of plants to find something that is the size of a pinhead and do this for several hundred of plants. It took me and three of my colleagues several weeks to get it all done. It was definitely crazy 🙂

      The other thing that comes close to crazy is high-risk high-reward projects. These are projects that have a very high chance of failing, but should they work the results would be very interesting. I haven’t done a truly high-risk high-reward project myself, but some of my colleagues have.

      I hope that answers your question.

Comments

  • Photo: Sam

    Sam commented on :

    I did a project when I was at university to study how ants search for new places to live. The experiments I did sound quite crazy, because I had to catch each ant in the colony (there were about 200 of them) and paint each one with 4 spots of paint in different colours so i could tell them all apart. Then I filmed them searching for a new home (and I had to commentate on the video because the camera wasn’t good enough to tell all the colours apart), and then analyse the video to measure how far all the ants walked while they were exploring. But what we found out from it was very interesting, each individual ant was laying a scent trail that they could recognise and counting the number of times it crossed it’s own path, and using that to calculate how large an area was and if it was big enough for the colony to live in.