• Question: what has been your most nervous peice of work and delicate

    Asked by ksiolajidebt to Angus, Christian, Hannah, Laura, Simon on 14 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by lilyfisher123.
    • Photo: Simon Holyoake

      Simon Holyoake answered on 14 Jun 2013:

      My most nervous was demonstrating a piece of kit to the military! it was an early prototype and I was biting my nails that it would either stop working, go bang with a large puff of smoke, or produce rubbish data! Fortunately it worked perfectly for the whole trial!

      My most delicate has been preparing rock samples for testing, they have to be measured to a very high level of accuracy (less than 0.1 of a millimetre) weighed, and kept isolated from the air (as they either lose moisture, or suck moisture from the air in!) then I had to put a very fine ring of powder around the top to act as a seal, and encase it in teflon tubing…. needless to say it took me about 10 attempts to get it right!

    • Photo: Christian Maerz

      Christian Maerz answered on 15 Jun 2013:

      Right now, we are on a drill ship in the Pacific, analysing the chemistry of mud buried in this area over the last millions of years. To analyse organic carbon (which is basically the leftovers of soft parts of animals and plants), we need to weigh around 20 milligrams of dry sediment powder into tiny and very delicate tin capsules. This is difficult on a ship and requires a special balance (normal ones don’t work because the ship is constantly moving). Then we need to form a little ball out of these tin capsules containing the powder, and they very easily break, so you have to start over again… requires a very still hand.

    • Photo: Angus Ferraro

      Angus Ferraro answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      Most of my work is on the computer, so I don’t really get to do ‘delicate’ stuff. But one thing about computers is that they have no common sense. They do exactly what you tell them to do even if it’s nonsense. This means I have to be very careful setting up a climate model run. Once I waited for a month for my run to finish only to realise I had set it up wrong!

    • Photo: Laura Roberts Artal

      Laura Roberts Artal answered on 18 Jun 2013:

      I always get really nervous when I have to sharme my work with other people. As scientist, we have to show our results to other scientist and we do that at big get togethers (conferences) where we give a talk in front of a big audience, or make a huge poster with our results. Preparing the talk or the poster is delicate, everything has to be just right and then talking in front of so many peole makes me really nervous!
      But, I enjoy it at the same time because I see all my findings come together and people come up to you with new ideas and things to discuss, which is always fun!

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