Question: What would do with £500? P.S how did you come to be scientists

Jennifer Bates answered on 7 Nov 2016:

I got into science because I wanted to know what people were eating in the past. I was working on a site in Turkey that dates to around 4000 years ago and I was asked to run something called a flotation machine. It separates charred ancient seeds from soil by adding the soil to water and bubbling air through it. The seeds float because they are light but the soil sinks. A lot of seeds were in the machine but without a microscope I couldn’t work out what they were, and that is when I realised I wanted to know more, I wanted to work out what they were, and what that meant about how people were living on this site 4000 years ago – what were they eating, how did they get that food, how did they grow it, what was the environment like and did that change over time? So I decided to take the archaeological science course in my degree and volia! Archaeological scientist in the making!

And that’s the sort of thing I’d like to be able to show with the £500 – that there all sorts of weird and wonderful things you can apply science to. At school it often seems like there are three sciences: chemistry, biology and physics, but there is so much more that science can be used to do – from working out what people were eating thousands of years ago by pouring chemicals on soil to extract fossils of plant cells, to how we might be able to use modern algae as a bio-battery, and to model skeletons using a 3D laser scanner. I want to use the money to set up a scheme where we take active researchers from the less-heard-of sciences into schools and give students a chance to try them out with hands-on experience.