• Question: what is the most unusual job which involves science?

    Asked by to Andrew, Elaine, Emma, Michael, Nancy on 18 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Nancy Carlisle

      Nancy Carlisle answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      So many, so so many. Some scientists test poo to diagnose different diseases. There was a researcher where I got my Phd who studied the naked mole rat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_mole_rat) which is the weirdest looking animal I’ve every seen. Some scientists go out in search of new species that have never been discovered before. Other people use science to decide how short to cut a golf course lawn because you have to know information from science about how short grass can be cut before it is killed. Science is EVERYWHERE: from the food labels that tell us how long until a food is unsafe, to the fuel in the cars we drive, to understanding how to keep us safe! All of these things are based on science! 😀

    • Photo: Emma Reid

      Emma Reid answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      This is a tricky one to answer as there are lots of unusual jobs in science! One of my lecturers at uni used to go to the forests of Brazil every year to study the behaviour of Sloths! I thought this was pretty wacky but also really cool! 🙂

    • Photo: Andrew French

      Andrew French answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      Scientists usually work at the “cutting edge” of human knowledge – they are always looking at something new, or something old in a new way.
      Anything new can seem wacky to start with, so quite often scientific work appears a bit zany when you think about it!

      But I’m sure for most science, in a few years when the work becomes accepted, and new technology, products or medicines etc. are developed from the work, it will appear ‘normal’ and mainstream. Doing scientific experiments in space must have seemed like science-fiction in the 1950’s, yet today it’s going on all the time in the International Space Station – its so ‘normal’ it doesn’t even make the news!

      By the way, talking of science fiction: quite often (at least when it comes to new technology) you can find the seeds of new ideas in science fiction books. Whether this is because scientists get inspiration from science fiction, or because scifi authors by nature generate a lot of new and interesting ideas, I don’t know (bit of both?!). For example, have you read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? Even though it was written years before they were invented, its basically talking about what we know today as smartphones 😎

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