• Question: do you always use technical stuff with your experiment?

    Asked by lindseymerrygold to Christine, Edd, Jess, Nicolas, Zara on 13 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Zara Gladman

      Zara Gladman answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      Some of the equipment I use isn’t very technical at all – buckets and nets! Other stuff is a little bit technical, like how to use a crayfish trap. And other stuff I’ve had to take a bit of time to learn how to use. A couple of summers ago, I studied the movements of crayfish by ‘radiotracking’ them. This involved attaching tiny tags to the crayfish, then releasing them. The tags give out a signal that can be picked up by a big antenna, which is connected to a receiver. By moving the antenna around, I was able to figure out which direction the crayfish was in, by listening to how strong the signal was. The equipment was fairly easy to use but it took a bit of practice! I tried it out in the park with friends (we played a very technical game of hide and seek!) before I used it on crayfish.

      Other technical stuff I’ve had to figure out is how to use electrofishing equipment. Electrofishing is a kind of fishing that uses electricity and I use it to catch crayfish and fish. I’ve also learned out to use an ROV (remotely operated underwater vehicle). I can drive the ROV (like a remote controlled car) along the bottle of a loch and watch on a TV screen to see what it looks like down there. It’s pretty cool, sometimes I feel like I’m exploring another planet!

    • Photo: Edward Codling

      Edward Codling answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      A lot of my work is done on computers – using maths and simulations to try and explore problems about animal behaviour. Often this is a bit like a computer game – we set up some rules in the game and see how our animals behave under certain conditions. Obviously this is not ‘real’ but if we can understand our virtual animals we hope that this might help understand real animals as well.

      I do also do some experiments where we observe the behaviour of real animals and compare this to our simulations. We are currently looking at the movement behaviour of plankton (tiny little bugs that live in water) as they swim around. This is technically very difficult as we have to film in 3-d at very high levels of magnification using a microscope. We are also looking at the behaviour of fish in a simple tank – this is not quite as technical but we still need to make sure the water is clean and the fish are looked after well.

    • Photo: Christine Switzer

      Christine Switzer answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      Most of my experiments use technical things (I like toys!) but some do not.

      I have a project now on garden soils where the most important data comes from asking people about how they garden and why. We will do some technical studies of their soils and vegetables, but the most important thing we have to learn is how to communicate our results to the public.

      In another project, the most interesting results are visual. We are comparing recent and old photos to measure how much change has occurred at a site. The site has an underground fire that has been burning for months or years. We don’t know how long. We have an aerial photo from Google Maps from 10 years ago and then some more recent photos from our own visits to the site. We are using historical documents about the site to tell us the starting condition. Our results from sampling can tell us how much has changed since then. The photos will be essential to figuring out how much has burned and possibly how much longer the site will burn.

    • Photo: Nicolas Biber

      Nicolas Biber answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      Definitely not always. Especially when I am running an experiment or I am collecting data in the field I like to keep it simple, because technical stuff gets so easily damaged outside. I mostly use meter rulers of sorts. The most technical things I use in the field are a camera and a GPS (global positioning system) that tells me where I am.
      In the lab it’s really quite convenient to make use of all the technology we have at hand. I use a microtome that cuts my samples into slices that are only a fraction of a millimetre thick, and specialized microscopes to look for fluorescent particles. The most technical bit of equipment I use is probably the FTIR (fourier-transform infrared spectrometry) microscope. This microscope takes a scan of a material sample and tells me what it’s made of.

    • Photo: Jessica Chu

      Jessica Chu answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      I don’t always use technical stuff! In one of my experiments – the clonogenic assay, all I need is after treating my cells, I will wash and stain them then count them (inside a plate) with a marker pen!!

      But sometimes I get to use:

      The flow cytometer – I can measure cell size and amount of content with this machine. If I have given my cells a fluorescent dye and they absorb it then the amount of fluorescence can be measured.

      The spectrometer to measure the optical density (basically how intense are the colours of the solution or of my cells)- very simple, just put the plate in and the machine does the rest.

      The HPLC (high performance liquid chromatography)- long and fancy name but it is really simple because it is all automated. So it will inject your sample in the correct column (a special metal tube with a lining of sand inside) and have a UV light detector which measures any chemicals that excites at the particular wavelength you have set it to detect!

      Mass Spectrometer – (I remember reading this in GCSE/A level time) basically you only need a small amount of sample and the Mass Spec will fire it out at a super high speed to the detector at the other end! So the smaller chemicals in the sample will hit the detector faster compared to the bigger/heavier chemicals!

Comments