• Question: What was the most dangerous experiment you have done and funniest?

    Asked by anon-230120 to Sarah, Isaac, Hira, Elena, Anisha, Alex on 15 Nov 2019. This question was also asked by anon-230014.
    • Photo: Alex Leide

      Alex Leide answered on 15 Nov 2019:

      I have used some strong acids which could be very dangerous, but we handle them very carefully and safely to make sure nobody can get hurt. I can’t really think of any funny experiments, but one made me jump and cheer when it worked. Maybe the happiest I have ever been after an experiment! I was using something called a focussed ion beam to cut things on a nanoscale, a few atoms at a time. I was hoping to make a small lever move when I cut the end off, and it did! To me it was really fun, but nobody else understood my excitement!

    • Photo: Anisha Wijeyesekera

      Anisha Wijeyesekera answered on 17 Nov 2019:

      The most dangerous and funniest are both when i need to prepare my faecal (poo) samples for my research. I need to be so careful that I contain the sample in the prep area so it doesn’t spill and potentially make it dangerous for myself and other users in the lab, and when i have to weigh out the samples, others in the lab have said that my face is absolutely hilarious, that it makes me laugh at myself too!

    • Photo: Sarah Knight

      Sarah Knight answered on 18 Nov 2019:

      To be honest, there aren’t a lot of dangerous things that hearing psychologists do! Although of course we always try to make sure everything is as safe as possible — for example, we’re always careful to make sure that we never play any of the sounds too loudly.

      I think the funniest experiment I’ve ever done was about laughter! My colleagues were doing a study to find out whether or not we can tell when somebody is faking a laugh. This meant recording real and fake laughter, and then setting up an experiment to play the different laughs to people and asking them to judge whether they were real or not. Listening to people laugh, both in real life and on the recordings, always made me laugh too!

    • Photo: Elena Maters

      Elena Maters answered on 19 Nov 2019:

      The scariest laboratory experiments that I have done are using a reactor to mimic some of the conditions inside of an eruption plume. The reactor is kind of like a big oven or tumble dryer that we can heat up to 900 degrees Celsius and inject gases like sulphur dioxide into, all while my volcanic ash samples inside are tumbled around to expose them to these high temperatures and toxic chemicals. I have to be really careful when I use this reactor not to burn myself or breathe in the dangerous fumes! The funniest experiment that I have done is measuring the amount of iron released by volcanic ash in water, since the measurements had to be done in the dark with only a small red lamp for light (since the iron was ‘photosensitive’). I kept crashing my knees into cupboard handles and losing tools on the lab bench because it was too dark, and I couldn’t help but laugh every time I did something silly because of being unable to see properly what I was doing!

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