• Question: what was the first experiment outside of required aducation that you did? did you enjoy it?

    Asked by anon-233325 to Varun, Sammie, Rebecca, Anna, Alin, Adam on 12 Nov 2019.
    • Photo: Rebecca Shaw

      Rebecca Shaw answered on 12 Nov 2019:


      My first ever solo experiment in university was on woodlice and their distribution within different environmental substrates e.g. grass, soil, concrete, wood chip. It was for one of my classes (funnily named BUGs) and myself and a few others had to come up with an idea, plan the experiment, carry it out and analyse our findings all by ourselves.
      We found it SO difficult because we had never done this before and had no idea’s. We finally came up with this idea, stole some concrete paving slabs out of my mum’s garden (I did put them back afterwards :P) and put them around different substrates around our local park.
      Our idea was that woodlice would like wetter, moister environments (so ones closer to the river) instead of drier ones up the hill.
      We left it a week to give them time to colonise their new patch and came back to count how many woodlice we could find……

      We found 2. Under a dry slab…. That was the hardest piece of work I have had to write up because I was so negative about it all!

      Looking back though it was fun. I got to go outside and do my own project, even though it had failed! It was also a lesson in what was to come for all my other projects.. 🙂

    • Photo: Samantha Firth

      Samantha Firth answered on 12 Nov 2019:


      The first experiment I did after uni was helping test water pH in a big pool of fish at an aquaponics farm 🐟🐠 It was pretty interesting until I accidentally wiped my arm against the pool filter and got covered in fish poo 🙃💩

    • Photo: Adam Washington

      Adam Washington answered on 12 Nov 2019:


      I’d say that the first real experiment that I ever did was measuring the uniformity of a magnet we had built. Now, we had a whole robot that had been built to stick meters into magnets and measure the uniformity of the fields. The problem was that we needed the uniformity INSIDE the magnet. There was only one tiny hole in the magnet and it was thinner than a sheet of paper. My colleague tried to shove the magnetometer through that hole and promptly broke it (the professor we borrowed the meter from wouldn’t lend us anything again for a LONG time).

      We couldn’t make the hole any bigger, since that would change the answer. The solution that we came to was sending a neutron beam through the magnet. Neutrons will rotate when in a magnetic field and, by checking how much they rotate, we could tell how strong the field was.

      We applied for some beam time at the Intense Pulsed Neutron Source, which was just outside of Chicago. It’s not there any more – they lost their funding about ten years ago in a giant political battle. Anyway, they gave us a weekend to measure our magnet. We start setting everything up on Friday, only to find out that our magnet developed an electrical short during the six hour car ride out there. We then had an afternoon to decompose and rebuild the magnet that we’d spent most of the summer building.

      We managed to get the magnet working again just before all of the technicians went home for the night. Once we had the magnet in the beam, though, we discovered that we didn’t have a proper way to move it. Most of the samples that people brought there to measure were about the size of a wrist watch and they had motors set up to move those small samples very precisely. Our sample was the size of a loaf of bread and we wanted to look at all of it. Since there weren’t any motors, we would need to move the magnet by hand.

      Moving the magnet by hand wasn’t that hard on its own. The problem was that the measurements took two hours a piece. For safety reasons, the lab had a buddy system, so no one could be in the lab alone. Also, due to a conference, there was no available space in the visiting scientist guest house, so we would need to stay at the nearby hotels (about a half hour drive away). The result was that we could start a measurement, go back to the hotel, sleep for forty-five minutes, leave the hotel, go back through lab security, turn off the neutron beam, move the magnet, turn the beam back on, and start the whole process over again. Forty-eight hours with no more than three-quarters of an hour’s consecutive sleep. Certainly not the worst sleep schedule I’ve ever gone through, but not exactly the sort of thing that leaves you feeling refreshed and ready complex math during the day.

      In fact, this grogginess came to a head at 2AM on Sunday morning. There was an ancient VAX computer (no relation to the VAX vacuum cleaners) that ran the experiments. It had a program that could show us that the neutrons were rotating properly before we left, in case we developed another electrical short. The catch was that this computer was so old that it only had 8 MiB of memory (about the size of a single MP3). Running the program for very long would cause the computer to run out of memory and crash. Well, at midnight on Sunday, I forgot to close the program, which meant, come 2AM, the VAX had crashed. We couldn’t start a measurement if the VAX wasn’t running, so I was forced to call the instrument scientists to come in and restart the computer (turning the VAX off and on wasn’t as simple as just flipping a switch).

      At the end of all our beam time, I was exhausted and embarrassed. We also still had a six hour drive back home ahead of us and a full week of work to look forward to, since the end of the experiment was the end of the weekend. Still, I remember running through the analysis on my laptop during the drive back and finding that our magnet was 99.997% uniform. That single moment made me start looking forward to my next experiment.

    • Photo: Varun Ramaswamy

      Varun Ramaswamy answered on 12 Nov 2019: last edited 12 Nov 2019 12:18 pm


      ooh, my first experiment was to try and clone human kidney cells to make them glow in the dark. Back then the steps seemed quite complicated to me, but I was really excited to see a plate of glowing cells!

Comments