• Question: What has been / was your most important scientific finding? Your most surprising finding?

    Asked by liiepa_a to Chris, Joanne, Kathryn, Kieran, Sarah on 7 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Kathryn Schoenrock

      Kathryn Schoenrock answered on 7 Nov 2017:

      Hmmm, well this is very specialized. But I worked in Greenland for the past two years and we had a lot of trouble finding on specific species of seaweed we wanted to study. I ran some experiments and found that the seaweeds really doesn’t like freshwater, which comes from the melting Greenland Ice Sheet. Basically, the melting Arctic ice affects everything from polar bears to (we now know) seaweed- that’s a sad story but it’s an interesting result.

    • Photo: Sarah Guerin

      Sarah Guerin answered on 7 Nov 2017:

      I think my most surprising finding was that if you squeeze mussel shells they generate electricity!

      My most important finding was that I can write a code to predict how much electricity materials can generate when you bend them- so I can pick the best materials to make sensors out of.

    • Photo: Chris Werner

      Chris Werner answered on 8 Nov 2017:

      No major scientific discoveries from me yet! But a couple of projects I’ve done have helped solidify some theories.

      Most notable was looking at the structures in a meteorite, helping to prove that during Earth’s early formation, there were small planets called planetesimals which crashed into each other, and eventually creating the rocky planets we know today. the evidence was in the droplets you can see in the meteorites, called chondrules.

    • Photo: Joanne Duffy

      Joanne Duffy answered on 10 Nov 2017:

      I think the most important thing was when I was able to prove that a virus which was causing a problem in my lab was there. We had suspected that it was causing a problem because it makes little white stringy bits appear in a flask of liquid, but we wanted real, DNA proof, like a crim scene! So I did an experiment and proved it was there, which meant we could try and address the problem. That finding was also surprising because we don’t know how it happened!

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