• Question: wats the craziest experiments u ever done

    Asked by bossofslang to Sarah, Paul, Mark, Lily, Laura on 17 Jun 2010 in Categories: . This question was also asked by charlottelancaster, margarita, britishbeef.
    • Photo: Lily Asquith

      Lily Asquith answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      I don’t do crazy experiments for my work. The government won’t let me. If you want to do crazy experiments you should google “times do try this at home”. Good site.

    • Photo: Laura Maliszewski

      Laura Maliszewski answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      Craziest? I suppose it depends on how you define crazy. I spent most of my work taking blood samples from my lab mates and then infecting their cells with HIV. Most people think that’s pretty crazy.

      It was all done with the proper safety controls so it wasn’t risky or dangerous, but is pretty different from how most people spend their days!

      My friend’s little sister is an astrobiologist. She once took some bacteria, put them on a rock that was attached to the outside of a rocket. The rocket got shot up into space, came back to earth, and they sent her the rock back so she could see if any bacteria still lived on it, and if so if it was the bacteria she put on it. Turned out it was!

      That, I always thought, was pretty crazy. Check it out: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16379527

    • Photo: Mark Roberts

      Mark Roberts answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      Craziest experiment – well by crazy do you mean blowing things up ? I guess the craziest thing I’ve ever done is make a Jelly Baby explode life on Radio Oxford (yes ok perhaps not excellent radio) but the aim was to show how much energy there is in the sugar.

      My day to day work is more sedate really though do get to play with Liquid Nitrogen from time to time to help break cells open

    • Photo: Sarah Bardsley

      Sarah Bardsley answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      Whilst diving with a group of people (plus circling sharks) in Australia we investigated the effects of something called nitrogen narcosis on our bodies.

      When you dive to a certain depth (30 metres or deeper) you breath gases under a higher pressure. This causes a build up of nitrogen levels in your blood which can lead to a feeling of happiness or drunkenness.

      Our dive instructor had us all kneeling in a circle in the bottom of the sea floor. He used a special board to write all our names down and assigned a place name to each. Our task was to take this board, find our names on it and our particular place name and write that place name backwards. A very simple task on land and feeling normal but if experiencing nitrogen narcosis it could be a bit tricky.

      I got ‘liverpool’ and whilst I was able to write this backwards it did take me a while to figure out. One girl was away with the fairies. She wrote everybody’s name and place name backwards! She also spent most of her time dancing and twirling her arms around like a loon!

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