• Question: What interesting thing have you found out with your reasearch?

    Asked by ena145 to Laura, Lily, Mark, Paul, Sarah on 24 Jun 2010 in Categories: . This question was also asked by eleanorbeedles, ilovepie, morgan12345.
    • Photo: Laura Maliszewski

      Laura Maliszewski answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      My favorite thing that I learned in my research is that HIV, the virus that causes AIDS has different effects on different types of blood cells.

      Your blood is made up of a lot of stuff. Some is liquid and goo called serum and plasma. Some is red blood cells that carry oxygen and some is white blood cells that help you fight germs.

      There are several kinds of white blood cells, but I studied two, Macrophages (literally ‘big eaters’ in Greek) that roam around the body and eat/engulf damaged cells and germs. They clean up your body like little sucker fish do an aquarium.

      The second kind I studied are T cells. These cells recognize germs in your body and alert all your other cells as to the invaders.

      When HIV infects T cells, it makes a lot of virus quickly and the cells literally explode because they’re full of viruses (this is called lytic infection) and die. This causes the ‘low T cell’ levels you might have heard of in people with AIDS. This is bad because you need T cells to fight all kinds of infections and people with low T cells get very sick easily.

      When HIV infects Macrophages, the virus still replicates, but does so more slowly and actually causes the Macrophages to live for longer than they would if they were not infected at all. That way virus is produced in the body for a long time since the infected Macrophages don’t die.

      I thought it was really interesting that the virus does different things in different blood cells and tried to work out why so that maybe we could find a way help people with AIDS that would either keep the T cells from dying or make the macrophages not live so long once infected.

    • Photo: Mark Roberts

      Mark Roberts answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      I found out how bacteria turn off the signal when they have moved away from a smell / chemical.

      But generally I think the fact that bacteria sense and respond to the world is fascinating! I used to have no idea bacteria were so complex!

      It’s cool to think all these small things are happening around us all the time

    • Photo: Paul Roche

      Paul Roche answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      In astronomy terms, probably the most important thing I’ve discovered was a certain type of star that people had suspected existed, but had not seen before. It was a “dead star” – a neutron star – that was spinning incredibly quickly (about 900 times per second – and it is “only” the size of London, and about 1.4 times as heavy as the Sun….), and blasting out X-rays, which is what we initially detected.

      I then spent hours trying to get astronomers all over the world to take optical images of the area of sky where the X-rays were coming from. Eventually I got some pictures from Hawaii that showed a “new star” at the place near where we thought the X-rays were coming from – but I had to promise the astronomer out there that I would buy them lots of beer when we next met! It made a short story in the Guardian newspaper called “Stella Astronomy”…

      Otherwise, I think the most interesting thing I do is taking astronomy out into schools, and talking about science and how interesting/exciting/fun it can be – maybe not like you are used to in school….!

    • Photo: Sarah Bardsley

      Sarah Bardsley answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      I find out loads of interesting things. I’m basically a fashion spotter for new environmental issues. So I research things like ocean acidification (a lowering of the pH which will impact marine life), synthetic biology (man-made organisms!), biochar (charcoal which could store carbon in the soils), home fabrication (cool 3D printing!!), assisted colonisation (moving animals to new climate change suitable locations) and monitoring (using phones to monitor the environment). Plus many others. I’m a bit of a generalist – learning lots about lots rather than specialising in one subject!

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