• Question: What has been your toughest experiment to do so far?

    Asked by beccasmiley123 to Catherine, Charlotte, Colin, Becki, Rick on 24 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by jnorthy.
    • Photo: Rebecca Scott

      Rebecca Scott answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      Oooh, that’s a tough question! I think the hardest experiment I did was when I had to fire a bullet into a sand box to see what would happen to the bullet. The question was whether it was worth excavating to recover a bullet, or whether the sand would have removed all the forensic evidence. The experiment had so many variables that it made it quite hard to interpret all the data. The type of sand and the type of bullet will all affect the results…

    • Photo: Colin Swift

      Colin Swift answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      Making an underwater vibration sensor using laser beams. Amazingly it worked in the end too – always a good thing!

    • Photo: Charlotte Dalton

      Charlotte Dalton answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      What I am trying to do at the minute! we want to attach a fluorescent molecule to our sugars so we can investigate them using light but it is proving much more difficult then we thought as the chemical reactions are really slow, we will get there though 🙂

    • Photo: Catherine Fontinelle

      Catherine Fontinelle answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      Hi @beccasmiley123

      There are some really unusual bacteria that are very hard to identify, and when we find them they take ages to I.D. We have to do lots of chemical tests and growth tests to work out what they could possibly be.
      There are some really clever tests now, one of which is based on DNA profiling. Watch CSI and you may see some of our machinery in the background!

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