• Question: on average how often do you do an experiment a month?

    Asked by IanHardt to Freddie, Jena, Kirsten, Kon, Zarah on 5 Nov 2016. This question was also asked by its abbi 123.
    • Photo: Konstantinos Drousiotis

      Konstantinos Drousiotis answered on 5 Nov 2016:

      Hi there,

      It all depends on how many you have performed already and how many you are aiming for within a month. I think nearer the end of the PhDs (last year) most tend to do more experiments. But again it depends on each student and the level of organisation they’re aiming for.

      Also it varies on what type of experiments these are. I have friends who work with mice and it takes around year to get enough of them. Also, friends who work with plants, which tend to take three months to grow at the level they want them to be. Scientists who work with flies normally wait around two weeks to get the set of flies that interests them. In my case, bacteria grow within 24 hours which is great and one of the major reasons I chose bacteria over other organisms. I’d say I carry out 7-10 experiments on a busy week and 1-5 on a less busy one.

    • Photo: Jennifer Bates

      Jennifer Bates answered on 6 Nov 2016:

      It depends.

      There is a whole branch of archaeology called experimental archaeology, which is all about running tests on ideas, like metal working and textile production by recreating what we find on sites. It’s pretty awesome to visit experimental archaeologists at work.

      For me, experiments are not very common as I only need them when I really can’t work out what my archaeological samples are telling me. The last one I worked with was about a year ago with a friend, where she charred some cereals at different temperatures for isotopic analysis to look at water use, and I then looked at them to think about how hot a fire may have been in my ancient samples.

      I tend to work more with ancient samples, and I do that almost everyday. These are samples we get from excavations which we go on sometimes twice a year for a month, or for one long digging season of two or more months.

      At the moment though I am preparing to do an experiment to see if some modern plants make something called ‘phytoliths’ which are microscopic glass fossils of plant cells. I’m going to be bleaching bits of each plant tissue then making slides to look for phytoliths, and trying to work out if they can tell me about tissues and species, so if I come across them in soils from my archaeological site I can identify them.

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