• Question: What recent discoveries have you found in your work?

    Asked by hippo to Simon, Rebecca, David, Verity, Wei on 21 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by cbooth9756, stormmoolman.
    • Photo: David Armstrong

      David Armstrong answered on 20 Jun 2011:

      I’m currently writing up some work for publication about what happens to the mechanical properties of tungsten when we fire tungsten atoms at it. These behave like neutrons in a fusion reactor and damage the tungsten. It is important to understand how the tungsten’s mechanical properties vary as we change the dose of atoms we fire at it. As the tungsten components are at the hottest part of the reactor if they are damaged the reactor will stop working. I have found the tungsten gets much harder after having tungsten ion’s fired at, and am now trying to understand if this is a problem.

    • Photo: Wei Xun

      Wei Xun answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      I have recently found a possible link between how much B-vitamins are in people’s blood and how high their blood pressure is. Even though I don’t know what that means yet as they were measured at the same time so I don’t know which came first.

    • Photo: Rebecca Handley

      Rebecca Handley answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      Recently I’ve been testing how well Campylobacter survives in hydrogen peroxide, as well as being used as a hair bleach hydrogen peroxide also occurs naturally in your body, usually it is produced by your immune system to kill bacteria. I deleted a piece of DNA in Campylobacter, and foudn that without that piece of DNA the bacteria can survive in a solution 30% hydrogen peroxide – thats enough to lighten your hair! I now know that the piece of DNA I deleted is a repressor- which means when it is present it stops other pieces of DNA being used – hope that makes sense!

    • Photo: Verity Nye

      Verity Nye answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      Last year we discovered hydrothermal vents in the Caribbean, including the world’s deepest hydrothermal vents. I’m currently working on describing several new species we discovered.

    • Photo: Simon Trent

      Simon Trent answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      I’ve found that an enzyme found in your brain might explain ADHD, the hyperactive and inattentive behaviour that some youngsters have. We have shown that mice born without this enzyme are really hyperactive and more impulsive, just like humans. We made this discovery a few months ago, but things can move quite slowly in science!

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