• Question: What's the most fascinating thing you have discovered?

    Asked by anon-174970 to Alex, Alison, David, Ella, hayleypincott, Thomas on 13 Jun 2018. This question was also asked by anon-175336, anon-175337.
    • Photo: David Mills

      David Mills answered on 13 Jun 2018:

      Everyone will have their own definition of fascinating, so this is a hard question to answer. The thing I’ve worked on that most people seem to be interesting in and what seems to be most generally applicable to other projects is being about to recover lost TV shows from old films.

      We worked with the BBC to recover a lost TV show that had only been kept on old old reel of film that was starting to rot. We have managed to get quite a lot of TV show recovered just by CT scanning the film and doing a lot of mathematics on the results.

      You can read about this here https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2017-12-morecambe-wise-video-film-archive-restoration

      I worked with Prof Graham Davis on this project.

    • Photo: Alison Hughes

      Alison Hughes answered on 13 Jun 2018:

      I discovered a toxin that was known to be produced by a particular fungus but I found it in a different type of fungus. It had never been found in that fungus before which was pretty cool for me

    • Photo: Hayley Pincott

      Hayley Pincott answered on 13 Jun 2018:

      As I don’t work in research I don’t really have the opportunity to discover anything but I find certain aspects of my work fascinating, such as seeing how far a cancer has spread, also knowing that a patients could have a certain illness because of where the lesion was in their mouth. I work very closely with researchers from Cardiff University and help them out with their lab work sometimes so I do get to have a look at their work and it’s great fun to see what they’re doing and finding out about.

    • Photo: Ella Mercer

      Ella Mercer answered on 14 Jun 2018:

      My best discovery working as a scientist was when I managed to grow skin from stem cells. It was so exciting because we fed the stem cells in the first couple of days then 30 days later they’d just created this skin structure by themselves! Because I’ve just started working as a scientist though hopefully I’ll have some more discoveries to tell you about soon! However, you don’t need to be a scientist to make a discovery! I was working in Greece a couple of years ago at a scuba diving school and one day me and my friend found the skeleton of a really big fish! It was very exciting and we felt like explorers! What’s your best discovery/find??

    • Photo: Thomas Perriment

      Thomas Perriment answered on 18 Jun 2018:

      I found fossils 10km below the ground! So these were actually trace fossils, which are evidence of the presence of an organism of some kind, rather than the thing itself. It’s a crazy thing called zoophycos and spirophyton icthnofacies, which are burrowed holes from burrowing organisms that lived on the sea floor. As landscapes evolve over time, from a desert one millennia to a super deep ocean millions of years later, the geological record changes and the rocks are moved about on huge scales, which is why we find shells on top of mountains! It was mad finding evidence of life this deep, even though we knew we might see evidence of life in rock this old (over 100 million years old!) it was amazing to see. Imagine the geological processes that would have occurred to move what was once the ocean floor over 10km beneath the earth!

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