• Question: what is the most interesting experiment that you have ever done?

    Asked by t7158 to Laura, Nicola, Norman, Sandra, Thanasis on 12 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by lennymclenlen, zurg92.
    • Photo: Nicola Wardrop

      Nicola Wardrop answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      When I was still at university I did a course on parasites. We had a lab every week, and normally we had to dissect things. Some of it was quite simple small things (like a fish), sometimes more tricky things like a mouse, but once we had to dissect a sea cucumber – do you know what they are? They are strange poo shaped creatures that live on the bottom of the sea, and they digest all the rubbish that the other fish leave on the bottom. They also have fish that live up their bums.

      Anyway, i thought it was an interesting lab because even when the sea cucumber was dead, the muscles would automatically tense when you tried to cut through it – it was like cutting through some really thick rubber, it took ages! I don’t really remember if we found any parasites in there, but the class remains in my memory!

    • Photo: Laura Soul

      Laura Soul answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      I went to Nepal a few years ago and hiked all the way through the mountains to the base camp of Mount Everest which is really high (5300m above sea level). It’s so high that there’s not as much oxygen in the air so strange things start happening to your body. While we were hiking up I did an experiment on myself (and my brother, he didn’t like it much) to see what was happening to us as we got higher up the mountain. It was really interesting because strange things were happening to me, like my heart beat really fast all the time, I couldn’t smell anything properly, there was much less oxygen in my blood than normal (I had a clever little machine that went on my finger to measure it) and strangest of all I had to test my wee with litmus paper and it got really alkaline! All these things were happening but I didn’t feel any different to normal which was odd.

      The best bit though was when you come back down the mountain because there’s loads more oxygen than you’ve had for the past two weeks so you get really giggly and you feel like you can run forever without getting out of breath.

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