• Question: what was your last science experiment

    Asked by af11350 to Christina, Colin, Jess, Samaneh, Steve on 16 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Christina Pagel

      Christina Pagel answered on 16 Jun 2013:

      Hello!

      My last experiment was working on a big medical experiment called a “clinical trial” – this is where one treatment is tried against no treatment to see if leads to better results… In this case the trial was in rural India, where many babies die within 4 weeks of being born. The area is very poor: 75% of women can’t read or write, half of all women and children do not get enough food and 80% of children are born at home with no professional help. The “treatment” was really different – it was village women getting together to come up with their own strategies for how they could help save babies’ lives. This included really simple things like washing hands, having sterile equipment, breastfeeding straight away and making sure the baby was warm. No one knew if it would work but it turned out that it reduced newborn deaths by 30% (that’s about 150 baby lives saved..!).

    • Photo: Steven Gardner

      Steven Gardner answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      My last experiment involved taking cells from cow’s eyes and measuring a property called refractive index. The refractive index of a material tells you how fast light can travel through it compared to through empty space. Glass has a refractive index of 1.5 which means light travels 1.5 times slower through it than through space. I wanted to find out the refractive index of cells so I could see if cells could be the cause of blindness some people suffer with because their cornea has turned cloudy (the cornea is the clear part right at the front of the eye).

    • Photo: Jess Bean

      Jess Bean answered on 18 Jun 2013:

      My last experiment was making a molecule that is fluorescent!
      Firstly I start with a molecule called hyaluronic acid. It is a long chain of sugar molecules that is a main part of your skin. It helps your skin to stretch! I then reacted this molecule with another chemical that is coloured. My experiment was to react this new coloured hyaluronic acid with bacteria, as it is known that most bacteria make an enzyme that breaks hyaluronic acid down. Hopefully as the bacteria grow the molecule gets broken up and so the colour gets released! This would help nurses know if bacteria are in a wound, as the more colour, the more bacteria!

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