• Question: wats ur favourite equipment in science to use and what on

    Asked by gibbzy97 to Antonia, Douglas, Hugh, Matt, Tom on 19 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Antonia Hamilton

      Antonia Hamilton answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      we have a gadget called ‘transcranial magnetic stimulation’ which we can use to control your brain and make your hand move. it looks like a big flat butterfly made of metal that I can hold against your head and when I press a button, your fingers will move! It is quite fun, but a bit hard to use right (and dangerous if you use it wrong)

    • Photo: Matthew Hurley

      Matthew Hurley answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      I love big pieces of expensive equipment! A mass spectrometer is a really really sensitive piece of equipment that can tell you the amount of small molecules there are in a small sample.

    • Photo: Tom Hardy

      Tom Hardy answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      A Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer. I use it to identify compounds.

    • Photo: Hugh Roderick

      Hugh Roderick answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      My current favourite piece of equipment is a hemispherical camera (takes a 180 degree picture from horizon to horizon) that I am using to take pictures of banana plant canopies from underneath. The aim is to tell how many nematodes are feeding on the plant by using computer software to measure the size of the canopy, so that we don’t have to dig up and kill the plants to count the nematodes. So far it is looking very promising.

      Another important, if not favourite, piece of equipment is the Gilson pipette, which is essential for the molecular biology (the name of the type of work I do). They are used to measure small amounts of liquid from a tenth of a ml to one ml, the range into which almost all measurements fall in my work and everyone else who does similar work, they are important enough that everyone gets their own set.

    • Photo: Douglas Blane

      Douglas Blane answered on 19 Jun 2010:

      Sorry it’s taken me a wee while to answer – been away on an assignment.

      I’m a theoretical physicist, which means I do most of my work in my head, on paper or on a computer. The most interesting piece of equipment I worked with was a simulator for an underwater intervention system. What’s that mean?

      Well it was a big piece of machinery controlled from a ship on the sea surface that did work on oil wells on the seabed, way below. We had to simulate it before they built the thing

      Now a simulation is like a computer game. In the real world you’ve got wind and waves buffeting the ship up above. You have a huge piece of equipment bouncing around on a cable down below.

      it’s dangerous conditions. So you want to be sure you know what you’re doing first.

      So we created a mathematical model on a powerful computer. That worked out all the forces and movements you’d get in the real world, and sent them to a computer generated image of the seabed and the oil well.

      The guy who’s going to be controlling the equipment in the real world from the ship practised first on our simulation. He would look at the CGI and operate the controls. They would send messages to our computer, which altered the CGI, which he saw, and then operated the controls. And so on, round and round, just like real life.

      It was a computer game with a serious purpose.

      Mostly the operators got it wrong at first on the simulation, because it was just too hard. So we had to change the design to make it much easier for them – or they wouldn’t have been able to do it in real life.

      That’s how new stuff gets done under the ocean or out in space. Scientists and engineers set up these simulations – these computer games – and the guys who’ll do the job practise on the game and see if they can do it.

      If they can’t, we re-design the equipment or find a different way of doing the job.

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