• Question: What have you discovered in the past 5 years

    Asked by anon-209684 to Verity, Sergio, Nick, Maria, David, Annette on 8 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: David Whitworth

      David Whitworth answered on 8 Mar 2019:

      That programming is not easy and superclusters aren’t as great as people think they are?
      Joking aside, I have only really made one discovery and it wasn’t really a discovery 🙁 For my MSc I had to model gravitational lenses and run them through an AI to see if we could detect them. This was all based off of what we think a new telescope that is being built will do and how it will perform, and the results showed that it will be AMAZING!!!!! Its called the SKA (Square Kilometre Array) and will be the largest telescope ever built and that it will be able to discover soo many new and interesting things. But, yeah not really a discovery, more of a confirmation of something we already expected.

    • Photo: Annette Raffan

      Annette Raffan answered on 8 Mar 2019:

      So in my MSc I found that a new potassium-calcium fertiliser has no effect on soil structure. Initially this could seem like a rubbish discovery because we would expect calcium to have positive effects on how a soil behaves e.g. how easily it erodes or breaks down with rain drops. In this case because it is a new fertiliser which is going to be used all round the world, we are also interested in the fact that it has no negative effects! So a no effect is all good!! I also found that plant roots change how water moves into the soil after a heavy rainstorm – they allow water to move away from the surface and down though the soil faster. Think of this bit as the roots providing big motorways to prevent congestion.

    • Photo: Nick Werren

      Nick Werren answered on 10 Mar 2019:

      Okay, I’ll have to describe something before I answer – if you want a particle to be quantum (weird and wobbly) and not normal then what most scientists do is they take the particle and put it in a very expensive chamber and they suck all the air out and make sure everything is very controlled and sensible. The particle then behaves like a wave and wobbles about in a very strange way inside your equipment.

      So far in my PhD I have discovered something very surprising – if you make a quantum system more messy, it can actually make the particle MORE QUANTUM not less. Which is very odd! At the moment I’m trying to find out why this happens and if we can use it to our advantage!! 😀

    • Photo: Maria Walach

      Maria Walach answered on 11 Mar 2019:

      I have found out quite recently that some of our atmospheric models and space weather models do not talk to each other very well. You need the space weather knowledge if you want to model the Earth’s atmosphere and not being able to model it well means we don’t have very good weather predictions. At the moment I am trying to fix by understanding the electric fields better and build a better model.

      I have also found out that the Earth’s magnetic environment doesn’t always respond in a straight-forward way to changes in the Sun’s magnetic field. The responses can be delayed or ongoing and it changes for example how much of the auroras (northern lights) we see! The auroras are generated by particles hitting the gas in the upper parts of the atmosphere, which gives off light. One of the things I learned is that these responses (for example how much auroras we see) are related to what the solar wind is doing (the solar wind is a stream of particles and a magnetic field coming from the Sun), but the responses are also decided by what is happening inside the Earth’s magnetic environment. For example, you can have a really direct response, but then if there is lots of aurora, the future response is slowed down. The slowing down then creates a build-up of energy, which is then deposited very very quickly and explosively!
      I also found that direct responses are predictable on the large scale, but on the small scale, we still struggle to understand it. We think this is because of atmospheric feedback into space where the magnetic fields dominate (so upward feedback), but we still need to study it more to find out exactly how it works!

    • Photo: Sergio Adan Bermudez

      Sergio Adan Bermudez answered on 11 Mar 2019:

      I have discovered that physics is harder than I thought. Since I studied more towards biology and chemistry, now I need to study more physics for my PhD. Also, I have learnt that this field has so many things to offer and it is fascinating. About my research, I have discovered that some anti-cancer drugs have more efficiency than others and that the liquid that we put them in have a huge effect on their applicability.

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