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Asked by sciencerules to Ailsa, Evan, James, Kath, Ryan on 16 Jun 2011.
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Evan Keane answered on 12 Jun 2011:
Great question! Hmmm well obviously I would pick astronomy as my first choice (which is what I already do!) so I will pick two other things which I think would also be cool to research. Two things which are very important to humans pop into my mind.
The first is energy – humans use lots of energy and we use burn things like oil and coal as fuel. This is not a great idea – it pollutes the environment (which could seriously harm us!) and anyway there is only so much oil and coal and it will run out eventually! We need a plan B! The answer to this problem is nuclear fusion which is energy you get from fusing small atoms together (this happens in the centre of stars and is where they get their energy to shine!). This is different to nuclear fission which is energy you get from breaking big atoms apart which is what we use now but has disadvantages (like nuclear waste, you can’t build them where there are earthquakes etc. ).
The second thing I think would be cool is researching food. This is because the population of Earth is growing but the Earth is the same size. Soon there will be a lack of space, especially for growing enough food for everybody. I think if we research that we can think of clever ideas for ways to grow enough food in the space we have.
But I think research into EVERYTHING should happen. Because sometimes you find things and they can be used by so many people. For instance there once was a guy in Australia who was trying to detect radio signals from black holes (like what I do) and in the process he invented wi-fi! So if his research into black holes was not encouraged we would not have wireless internet! If you do research you will discover things – so I think us humans should do research on as many things as possible! 🙂
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Kath O'Reilly answered on 12 Jun 2011:
I had to choose between working on animal diseases or human diseases. Before my current job I worked on animal diseases, which I always think are more interesting because I like studying ecology. So I’ve chosen to work on human diseases because the research was interesting and there was a job advertised, but hopefully I’ll work again on animal diseases! So I guess my answer is that I can’t decide!
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Ryan Ladd answered on 14 Jun 2011:
There’s so many things I would like to research that this is really tough to answer! Two areas that I would love to be involved in though are the space industry, working for the European Space Agency developing super efficient explorer robots to go to places like Titan, and, something completely different, these awesome animals called mantis shrimps. Mantis shrimps have these amazing claws which have evolved to “punch” their prey (crabs, sea snails etc.) and can hit so hard they can break glass!
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Ailsa Powell answered on 16 Jun 2011:
I’ve been thinking hard about this question.
One of the things I would like to consider is work I did in my previous lab. I was trying to understand how antibiotics stop working by looking at the shapes of the proteins that antibiotics target to kill bacteria. As part of this I was also looking for new proteins that we could develop new antibiotics against. As much as I enjoy my work on finding new ways of treating Malaria, I think I enjoyed the antibiotic work more.
The other thing would to be a planetary biologist and try and see if I could find any signs of life (some thing bacteria like I’m guessing) in the seas below the ice of Europa. Europa is one of the planet Jupiter’s moons and it is covered in an ice cap. There has been speculation that there is a liquid sea beneath the ice cap and that along with heat from the core of the moon there could be the right environment for some kind of life – something small like bacteria. I think it would be amazing to investigate that kind of stuff and look at the biochemistry of such bacteria-like things, seeing if they had the same kind of chemical processes that we have on earth and things like that.
So those would be my two things 🙂 And which one would I choose, well in the real world I guess the antibiotic research and in my wildest dreams – it would cool to be able to say “well I’m a planetary biologist” if people asked what you did!
🙂
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