• Question: Whats it like working with things so small?

    Asked by ciaranking to Shane, Aggelos, Andrew, Eileen, Naomi on 14 Nov 2012. This question was also asked by ilovenerds.
    • Photo: Naomi Elster

      Naomi Elster answered on 14 Nov 2012:

      It’s brilliant. It’s like discovering a whole world of secrets most people never get to see. Every day I take plain plastic bottles – really boring to the naked eye – and when I put them under the microscope I can see thousands of tiny, beautiful cells growing and interacting.

      It can be difficult. When I’m at the microscope for a long time I need to take short breaks to rest my eyes or else I’ll get headaches and make mistakes. And you need a lot of confidence as well in your techniques when you’re working with cells, as you often can’t see them when you are transferring them from one place to another.

    • Photo: Eileen Diskin

      Eileen Diskin answered on 14 Nov 2012:

      Well, the flamingos I wokr with aren’t all that small. They can be about 1 metre tall, although they only weigh a few kilos. What is not small about them is the amount of poo they can produce! (Its pretty stinky).

      But what IS small are the bacteria I get from them, which you need a microscope to see. I’m using these bacteria to figure out what kinds of diseases are in the water where the flamingos live. Because if there are lots of diseases in the water, it might be bad for humans…in a lot of places in the world, like Kenya, people drink water from their enviornments because they don’t have access to clean drinking water, like we do. So I’m trying to make sure that the chance of them getting diseases is as small as possible.

    • Photo: Shane Bergin

      Shane Bergin answered on 14 Nov 2012:

      It can be lots of fun. Mainly because we’ve only discovered (or in some cases made) small materials for the first time in the last 25 years! Because they are so small they behave differently to regular sized materials… for instance electrons (which carry electrical charge) behave v differently in small spaces.. compare how a person (the electron) would act if they were in a box versus if they were free to move around a place as big as Ireland… confinement changes things!

    • Photo: Andrew Jackson

      Andrew Jackson answered on 14 Nov 2012:

      Most things I work with are big. Small insects are as small as it gets for me or sometimes a small parasite living inside the small insect!

    • Photo: Aggelos Zacharopoulos

      Aggelos Zacharopoulos answered on 15 Nov 2012:

      @ciaranking
      my work usually involves relatively normal size things… saying that the science behind turning light into electricity happens at a quantum level which is at sub-atomic sizes! But thank God I just work with applications of solar energy 🙂

Comments