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Asked by anon-232598 to Rebecca, Adam, Varun, Sammie, Anna, Alin on 11 Nov 2019. This question was also asked by anon-232596, anon-232616, anon-233564.
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Varun Ramaswamy answered on 11 Nov 2019:
I think my most important discovery in my research would be that my protein doesn’t “walk” inside the cell like scientists thought. But instead, it actually “hops” around from place to place inside the cell. This is very interesting scientifically because while walking, you can imagine that one leg is always on the ground when the other leg is up. But while hopping, both legs are off the ground at once. So, a tiny protein doing that in our bodies to transport nutrients across is incredible. I can’t wait to discover its exact shape and figure out how it’s able to do that!
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Rebecca Shaw answered on 11 Nov 2019:
I found that fish belonging to the family Salmonidae (salmon, trout) have conserved a family of proteins over thousands of years of evolution. Not only that, but they have kept duplication’s of these proteins too. These proteins play a role in growth, cell regulation and have been linked to ageing. This is surprising as in humans we only have a known 7 variations of these whereas Atlantic Salmon have 22!
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Adam Washington answered on 11 Nov 2019:
Imagine a stadium with a bunch of elephants wandering around on the field. Now, someone lets loose a herd of rabbits. The rabbits and elephants are going to be bumping into each other constantly. However, when two elephants are standing right next to each other, there’s no space for a rabbit to get between them and bump them apart. However, they’re still surrounded by rabbits bumping them together. If you’re at the top of the stadium and can’t see the rabbits, just the elephants, it looks like there’s some weird force attracting the elephants to each other. This is called the depletion force.
There’s a very easy way to model the effect of this force. When elephants are apart from each other, there’s no attraction. However, when the elephants are less than a rabbit’s width apart, then a stickiness takes over, holding the elephants together. This is because there’s no longer a rabbit between them pushing them apart but there’s still rabbits around them, knocking them together.
Remember how I said that that was an easy way to model this force? Well, it’s also the wrong way to model it. Depending on the amount of elephants and rabbits, the elephants might start “sticking” together when they’re not only more than a rabbit’s width away, but even more than an elephant’s width away. Demonstrating that turned out to be a large part of my thesis.
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Anna Kalorkoti answered on 11 Nov 2019:
Because I work for a company rather than a university, my work is less focused on discovering brand new things that nobody knew before, and more on taking things we already know a bit about & using them in clever new ways. So it’s not a discovery, but I think the most important thing I’ve worked on is something called the Alarm Radar: this was designed to go into army bases that might be attacked by people nearby firing short-range rockets, and to spot those rockets before they could hit, giving people enough warning to take cover. It was the first system made for spotting these rockets, so I got to work on something that saved lives 🙂
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Samantha Firth answered on 12 Nov 2019:
I took photos of some UV patterns on flowers from the tropics that hadn’t been seen before! They patterns are seen by bees and other animals but are normally invisible to humans. With my specialist camera lens i managed to see like a bee 🐝👀📷
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