• Question: what do u do ???

    Asked by pastypashby to Jo, Mark, Donna, Stuart, timcraggs on 21 Jun 2010 in Categories: . This question was also asked by zzzape3, conn206, doogle, plumbsj01, clarkrm02, fabulousno1, foweller, saxamaphonev1.
    • Photo: Joanna Buckley

      Joanna Buckley answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      Hi Pastypashby, good talking to you earlier.

      My main job is to get people interested in science and I do that by devising science shows that entertain people, I write about fun aspect of science for people your age and talk about science in a weekly radio show I have on BBC Radio York every Tuesday.

      The science I do looks at silver being able to kill bacteria. Basically there are some very nasty bacteria knocking about and they make people who are already not very well really ill indeed. Have you heard of MRSA? It’s a hospital superbug and kills thousands of people each year. Ideally we’d like to get rid of it but at the moment we’re concerned about treating the poor people who have it. That’s what I do – researching what works and what doesn’t.

    • Photo: Donna MacCallum

      Donna MacCallum answered on 21 Jun 2010:

      Hi Pastypashby

      In my work as a research scientist I am mostly carrying out experiments. However, I also spend time designing the experiments and also rading abotu what other scientists in my research area are doing.

      I take part in teaching students at University (which I love), but also have to mark the exams!

      I have to apply for money to carry out my research – and that can take a long time! If i get a research grant it is worth it though!

      Does that help?

    • Photo: Mark Lancaster

      Mark Lancaster answered on 21 Jun 2010:

      Understanding what happened in the nano-second after the Big Bang and developing new accelerators to treat cancer/generate safe nuclear power.

      Using particle accelerators I am trying to understand how particles such as the electron acquire mass and why at the start of the universe, in the time taken to make a cup of tea, all the anti-matter mysteriously disappeared which allowed a universe dominated by matter to evolve to create stars, galaxies and ultimately humans. Without understanding why what we are made of has mass, and why matter survived being annihilated by anti-matter in the early universe, then we can have no knowledge of how we came to exist.

      We only have speculative theories of what generates mass (e.g The Higgs Mechanism) or what caused all the anti-matter to disappear (Sphalerons and Heavy Neutrinos !); so we need experiments to test these ideas. So far all we have is computer generated data or images such as the one above showing what would happen if a Higgs Boson were produced at the LHC and then decays (in 0.000000000000000000001 secs)…

      I’m also helping (well my PhD student is !) to develop a new type of particle accelerator that can be used to treat cancer (using protons instead of the usual X-rays) and which can also safely provide neutrons which can be used to get rid of harmful long-lived nuclear waste and which can also be used to power a thorium based nuclear reactor which doesn’t produce any isotopes useful for weapons and which can safely be turned on and off without the potential for it going “critical” and which also produces significantly less harmful nuclear waste than conventional uranium or plutonium reactors. The picture to the left is part of a prototype accelerator at Darsebury Labs in Cheshire which this year will hopefully demonstrate that a new novel way of particle acceleration is possible.

      I’m also trying to get a new experiment (COMET) off the ground in Japan which is seeking to answer why all the anti-matter disappeared at the start of the universe by looking at a very intense beam of muons (heavy electrons) and seeing if any of them spontaneously convert into electrons…

      I’ve also been (peripherally) involved in an experiment in Antartica trying to detect the most energetic and distant particles in the universe (ultra high energy neutrinos) which travel across the universe and interact with the Antartic ice producing a radio signal that can be detected by a balloon circling the South Pole with radio antennas attached.

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