• Question: What do you get up to in the Lab????

    Asked by ffioncrossland to Cesar, Emily, Jamie, Kate, Philippa on 19 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Jamie Gallagher

      Jamie Gallagher answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      I mix metals, seal them in a glass tube using a blow torch and then heat them until they melt. Then the metal turns to gass and will grow in a new way. Because I work with toxic materials I use a glove box to keep me safe :
      http://www.free-photos.biz/photographs/science/laboratories/71642_argonne_s_tribology_lab_-_nitrogen_glovebox.php

      That is just a random picture, the bald man is not me. I have more hair and better clothes.

      emm and Xrays, mircoscopes and vaccum pumps too.

    • Photo: Kate Clancy

      Kate Clancy answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      Nowadays I don’t do much in the lab, but I write the grants that will, with luck, bring money in so my students can do neat stuff! But mostly in my lab, we measure hormones in spit and pee. We do this with enzyme immunoassays. This is a fancy way of saying we put a known amount of substances into the pee or spit, in order to detect the unknown amount of hormone.

      I have also hired a clinician or sonographer to do ultrasounds of women’s uteruses before, and then I take measurements from the pictures.

    • Photo: Philippa Demonte

      Philippa Demonte answered on 19 Jun 2011:

      @ffioncrossland It depends on which lab I am working in: computer or rock lab.

      If it’s the computer lab, then I’m trying to programme a computer. This may seem like a lot of work and sometimes it makes my brain ache because I’m not particularly good at it, but when it does work, it actually makes life a lot easier. I can programme the computer to do a lot of hard calculations for many things at once.

      If I’m in the rock lab then I’m either studying large samples of rocks or what’s known as thin sections. These are really thin slivers of rock which have been cut with a machine and then mounted onto a glass slide for me to look at using a microscope. From the thin sections we can look at what minerals the rock is made of, and from their size, shape and way they fit together, we can work out how the rocks were made, maybe even at roughly what depth within the Earth they were formed. If we find two minerals in a rock which shouldn’t normally be found together, this can also tell us something about the history of the rock, i.e. that it has been ‘recycled’ as it has been erupted to the surface then buried within the Earth then erupted to the surface again. I’ve seen this on a sample of rock from South Africa which we looked at under a scanning electron microscope (@Jamie can tell you about this microscope) – the rocks in that area are thought to be some of the oldest in existence.

      I have to say though @ffioncrossland that most of my time is NOT spent in a lab. A lot of the science I’m doing right now here on the Caribbean island of Montserrat is outdoors on the volcano 🙂

Comments

  • Photo: Emily

    Emily commented on :

    I have two labs: an animal research lab where my rats are kept and where I get my samples and then a normal lab where I analyse all the data from the tissue I get from my experiments. Once I have my samples I could be cutting the brains, staining them, going fancy assays on them, looking at them down a microscope or many other things like that.