• Question: What is your favourite piece of scientific equipment to use ?

    Asked by anon-233435 to Varun, Sammie, Rebecca, Anna, Alin, Adam on 11 Nov 2019.
    • Photo: Rebecca Shaw

      Rebecca Shaw answered on 11 Nov 2019:

      I’ve recently been on a microscopy course and so my favourite piece of equipment so far is the electron microscope!
      Our microscope has the ability to see objects at a magnification of up to 450,000! That means we can see very clearly what a cell looks like, what viruses look like and microscopic organisms (like tardigrades)! The image can be very clear too so makes for a pretty picture.

    • Photo: Alin Elena

      Alin Elena answered on 11 Nov 2019:

      the computer… best instrument ever invented in my field. Allows you to experiment with matter fast and see how it works. you want to see what happens to water molecules if hydrogen is twice heavier… change it in the computer and then you know… would be much more difficult in the lab

    • Photo: Adam Washington

      Adam Washington answered on 11 Nov 2019:

      I’m biased on this one, but my favourite piece of equipment is a spin-echo small angle neutron scattering instrument. SESANS for short. I built one during my thesis and I run one for my job today, so it’s always going to have a special place in my heart.

      In short, just as Rosalind Franklin found the structure of DNA by hitting it with a beam of x-rays, you can also bounce a beam of neutrons off of things you want to get a better understanding of. As a general rule, the large the structure that you want to study, the less the neutrons will scatter. Thus, looking at something like DNA can be fairly simple, but looking at something much larger, like a whole cell, is much harder. You can try and measure smaller and smaller angles by making larger instruments, but there’s a better way.

      Every has a spin to it. We can take the neutrons and have them all spin in the same direction. We then pass the neutrons through a magnet, which causes them to turn and spin in a different direction. The neutrons then hit the sample and pass through a second magnet pointed in the opposite direction. If there is no sample, the second magnet turns the neutrons back to their original direction and everything comes out the same. With a sample, the neutrons will have bounced off at a small angle and take a different path through the second magnet than they did through the first one. This means that the neutron isn’t turned back exactly to its original direction, but is off slightly. The change in the direction of the spin is a one hundred thousand times magnification of the angle at which the neutron bounced. That allows us to measure samples a hundred times larger than what similar sized instruments can look at, because we can use this massive magnification.

    • Photo: Samantha Firth

      Samantha Firth answered on 11 Nov 2019:

      I once used a special UV camera which allowed me to take photos of flowers and show the UV patterns that bees see – which are normally totally invisible to humans! I got to see like a bee 👀🐝 That was pretty cool 😎

    • Photo: Anna Kalorkoti

      Anna Kalorkoti answered on 11 Nov 2019:

      I’m a big fan of the DSC (that’s “Differential Scanning Calorimeter” in full). It takes a small piece of material, heats it up or cools it down, and tells you how much energy the material is taking in or giving out at different temperatures. That might not sound very exciting, but it can tell you all sorts of things–from how pure a material is to how it melts to any other ways it changes with changing temperature. It can give you something like a “fingerprint” of a certain material, so you can check that you’re making it the same way each time. And it can do all this with a piece of material no bigger than a single grain of rice!

      It’s also useful in a lot of different areas of science. A few examples:
      – I’ve used it to check how different materials stand up to high temperatures, hotter than an oven, to see if we can use those materials in jet engines
      – If you’re making medicines, it can be used to check that you’re always making the right thing (that fingerprint again) and that there’s the right amount of it in a pill
      – I recently read an interesting article about it being used on chocolate–to try and make sure the chocolate melts in your mouth, but not on a supermarket shelf!

    • Photo: Varun Ramaswamy

      Varun Ramaswamy answered on 11 Nov 2019:

      Ooh, I would say have to say it is the X-ray Diffractometer (XRD). This was the first instrument that was used to fins the shapes of proteins. It shoots powerful X-rays through tiny crystals containing protein, and the X-rays bounce off (diffract from) the crystals. These diffracted X-rays hit a screen to form a pattern of spots, which changes depending on the shape of the protein in the crystals (kind of like a shadow, but spots are way more complicated) .

      The biophysicist then uses the positions and intensities of these spots to calculate the shape of the protein.

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