• Question: what equipment do you need to do your job.

    Asked by anon-224178 to Stuart, Scott, Lisa, Jack, Caragh, Alex on 19 Nov 2019.
    • Photo: Stuart Goldie

      Stuart Goldie answered on 19 Nov 2019:


      Scientists use lots of different types of equipment for very different things depending on what we are doing. I use a furnace that heats things to a thousand degrees, a laser to measure things, computers to help look at all the data, a box that keeps air out for chemicals that go off just touching air, electron microscopes that can see things even smaller than light (x100,000 zoom) and other things as well.

    • Photo: Caragh Whitehead

      Caragh Whitehead answered on 19 Nov 2019:


      My main equipment I use are things to measure out liquids and solids such as measure cylinders and beakers, scales and pipettes (to measure very small amounts of liquid). I then also use very specialised equipment like a high pressure vessel than can heat up my samples to a very high temperature or a hand held xray machine to measure chemicals in my plants such as silica. The best equipment I use is my robots. I have two and the one measures out a lot of small amount of material and the other does my experiment for me. The reason I have these robots is so that they can do lots more experiments than I could do on just my own. You can watch my robots working on this video that I made quite a while ago (ask your teacher for help to watch it).

      https://www.jove.com/video/3240/high-throughput-saccharification-assay-for-lignocellulosic-materials

    • Photo: Jack Saunders

      Jack Saunders answered on 19 Nov 2019:


      Like Caragh said, I use a lot of things to measure out liquids and solids. I also some glass equipment that’s like a big cooking pot to make my polymers in!

    • Photo: Alex Batchelor

      Alex Batchelor answered on 19 Nov 2019:


      My most important pieces of equipment are the microscopes. The one I use most is called a confocal microscope and uses lasers instead of normal light, the lasers make the dyes i use on my plant slices shine different colours which helps me work out what things I’m seeing. It costs about half a million pounds and I share it and the other microscopes with the other scientists where I work

    • Photo: Scott Dwyer

      Scott Dwyer answered on 21 Nov 2019:


      I use loads of different things. I have a few incubators I keep bees in at the same temperature found within the hive. I have a bee suit I use and I have a golf buggy I drive to the beehives (as sometimes carrying hives can be really difficult!). I also have a lot of pipettes and various tubes to store RNA to work out gene expression levels to various pathogens in the honey bees. And I have a lot of tubes and plates to grow fungus on.

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