• Question: have you actually invented anything yet?

    Asked by tammy to Christine, Edd, Jess, Nicolas, Zara on 12 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by clockwork18.
    • Photo: Edward Codling

      Edward Codling answered on 10 Jun 2011:

      My work doesn’t really involve inventing things as such. I am more interested in observing the behaviour of animals and understanding their interactions.

      However, some of the things I have found out about how groups of animals interact to do various tasks has been looked at by people who are designing teams of robots to do things that humans (or animals) might not be able to do (e.g. find things in dangerous terrain).

      Some of the computer simulations I have developed have been used by other scientists so I suppose they are inventions (sort of), but I haven’t invented anything that would make me famous!

    • Photo: Zara Gladman

      Zara Gladman answered on 11 Jun 2011:

      Like Edward, my work doesn’t really involve inventing things. I haven’t invented a crayfish yet! Most of the time I just watch what animals do and try and find out more about them. Inventing animals would be quite fun though…. isn’t that what pokemon are?

      One thing that I have ‘invented’ is a method for finding crayfish in a river. When I first started my PhD, I knew that there were crayfish in our rivers – but I didn’t know what the best way of finding them was. If we’re going to learn about crayfish then we need to be able to find them easily and quickly.

      I decided to test out different methods for finding crayfish and see which ones worked best. My results showed that using a combination of electrofishing (zapping electricity through the water, which stuns the crayfish and makes them easy to catch) and kick sampling (kicking around on the river bed and washing the dislodged crayfish into a net) will give you the best chance of finding crayfish in a river. Now fishery managers and biologists across Scotland use kick sampling and electrofishing when they want to look for crayfish, so it looks like my ‘invention’ works!

    • Photo: Jessica Chu

      Jessica Chu answered on 11 Jun 2011:

      I haven’t invented anything either!
      My project involves finding out if any of my rainforest plants contain anticancer activities!!
      And 2 of the plants are quite rare and from what I know- no one have done any biological testing on them yet!! So it is very exciting that they are giving me some quite strong positive results – yaaaay!!!
      So hopefully we will be able to find a new chemical that will be useful to treat diseases, in particular- cancer!! If it is something new, the whole process of turning the chemical into a drug will take a long, long time (possibly another 15/20 years?!).

    • Photo: Christine Switzer

      Christine Switzer answered on 12 Jun 2011:

      My research team has invented something! We came up with a new way of cleaning contaminated land. It was my bosses’ crazy idea. My coworker and I were hired to make it work. We started with a couple of drawings on a bit of paper and in about a year, we had it working in the lab. More recently, we have done field tests with it and it seems to work even better in the field. If our patent is granted, the five of us will be listed as inventors.

    • Photo: Nicolas Biber

      Nicolas Biber answered on 12 Jun 2011:

      As Edd and Zara said earlier, sometimes science is not really about inventing things. For me it’s the same really. My job is also to go out there, look at things, interpret my observations and report what I find out.
      BUT occasionally making observations or taking measurements can be very challenging and elaborate, and rather than doing all the labour we look for a method to make our work easier. In the same way Zara has invented a method for finding crayfish, I have developed a method to assess how much rubbish I find on a beach. Rather than a whole day it now only takes me just over an hour to give a fairly good estimate for that.
      So we do invent things and procedures, but we only invent them to make our actual work easier.

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