• Question: If you could get any one of your own questions about science what would it be?

    Asked by anon-292586 on 20 Apr 2021.
    • Photo: Kip Heath

      Kip Heath answered on 20 Apr 2021:

      I like this!

      My question would be: what is the best method to combat antibiotic resistance?

      Antibiotics are used to treat so many conditions that they are common place – ear infections, UTIs, during any surgery, etc. But at current rates there won’t be any left by 2050. It’s a huge upcoming health crisis and I want to know how we fix it!

    • Photo: Steve Briddon

      Steve Briddon answered on 20 Apr 2021: last edited 20 Apr 2021 4:50 pm

      This is a great Q and took a lot of thinking about!

      I’d love to be able to take a virtual reality tour on the top of a cell surface and see exactly how all the proteins are organised – especially the receptors I’m interested in – and watch the drugs stick to them and how they move in the cell. This would mean I could work out how to design a better medicine that would work with fewer side effects.

      We can sort of do this with microscopes, but we have to assume lots of things and the microscopes sometimes just aren’t powerful enough.

    • Photo: Quentin Leclerc

      Quentin Leclerc answered on 20 Apr 2021:

      If anything was possible, I’d like to be able to shrink down to the size of a bacteria. This way, I could observe bacteria grow an interact with each other in real time. In reality, it’s hard to always see what bacteria are doing because we need strong microscopes to see them! This makes studying them more complicated, as we often have to “guess” what they’re doing.

    • Photo: Lisa Humphreys

      Lisa Humphreys answered on 21 Apr 2021:

      This is a great question but also difficult. I weirdly come up with most of my questions on my drive to work based on what I hear on the radio. Two that have frequently been occupying my mind are these:

      1) How can we improve our road surfaces to prevent the formation of pot holes?
      2) How can we reverse engineer our plastics to speed up their breakdown so that we aren’t waiting hundreds of years for the materials that are clogging up our oceans to breakdown?

      Thankfully the latter question ties in with a lot of research being done into producing alternative plastics many of which seem to be based on natural materials like seaweed.

Comments

  • Photo: Rosie

    Rosie commented on :

    It’s not my field, but I’m curious about the apparent dark energy: something observed by astronomers that seems to make the Universe expand faster all the time and some scientists guess that it accounts for 68 per cent of the Universe.

    The nature of dark energy is still a complete mystery – I’d love to see if physicists could figure out what’s going on there!

  • Photo: Ross

    Ross commented on :

    Brilliant question!
    I would have to say abiogenesis (fancy word for how life began). I would love to know how what the first life form on Earth was like. What came first, a cell or DNA? Were there things in there that we don’t have today? What did it do? What did it eat?
    It would be huge to be able to study the ‘start point’ for evolution.