Question: have you made any discoveries
Keywords: discover, discoveries
Comments
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Hi plutox,
Maybe mine is not as cool as Steven’s, but i have made a discovery.I was the person who first discovered an invasive gecko in Canberra. Invasive species are those species that are not supposed to be in the area, like the cane toad.
The gecko i found is a very small species called the Asian House Gecko that normally lives in the warmer areas of Australia like QLD or NT.
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I have also made a discovery less interesting than Steven’s. When I was a scientist my job was to work out how a bacteria called Streptococcus pneumoniae made a layer of mucous that protected it from the body when it was making you sick. My big discovery was that a protein called CpsC clumps together with other CpsC’s to form what is called an oligomer (which just means a clump of many proteins). This is important because if you want to stop the bacteria making this protective mucous layer you have to break CpsC and knowing it forms a clump allows for us to try and design better drugs.
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Nice question, plutox.
Working in research, I think we are always making discoveries, whether they are really big or quite small. For example, I do a lot of chemical synthesis, which means that I take chemicals and carry out reactions on them to make new chemicals. I have made come chemicals that no one else has before, so I think that they might sort of count as ‘discoveries’ because I have found out that particular reactions or sets of reactions could be used to make these new chemicals.
I have also helped to work out the chemical steps in the biological pathway that occurs inside a certain species of fruit fly to produce its major pheromone, so that is my little discovery! 🙂 -
When I lived in Canberra I saw many of them, that was about 3 years ago and now I live in FNQ and they look exactly the same.
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I’m talking about the geckos of course!
pnemonoultramicroscopicsillicovolcanoconiosis
I think I just made one tonight! Seriously! Maybe I can talk about it in a few weeks. Previously though, yes. I discovered a star that produced a jet of material. When we looked at it, the jet appeared to be traveling faster than the speed of light – which is not possible according to Einstein’s theory of special relativity. It looked faster because of a type of optical illusion due to the direction the jet was traveling. We published the discovery in Nature, which is the world’s premier science journal. My team and I discover things all the time. Most of the time they are interesting but not Earth-shaking. Tonight’s discovery might be substantially bigger than that!
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I think I have answered this elsewhere but in short I discovered the shape a protein forms in the membrane of a bacteria called Streptococcus pneumoniae. This protein helps the bacteria to make a mucous layer that protects the bacteria from your immune system so by finding out more about it we hope to design a drug the stops these proteins from working. That way your immune system can get rid of the bacteria easier.
EDIT: Lol, i just looked further down and saw my original answer…
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Hi plutox, rachelk, holly, oalcorn, sara97, and cocacolarulez,
I have helped to work out the chemical steps in the biological pathway that takes place inside a certain fruit fly species to produce its major pheromone, so that is my little discovery! I also do a lot of chemical reactions and I have made come chemicals that no one else has made before, so I think that they kind of count as ‘discoveries’.
PS. I thought this question sounded familiar – I answered it in the comments before, too! 🙂
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While my discovery may not be as exciting as the others. I discovered the first invasive gecko species in Canberra. The Asian house gecko is an invasive species that competes with native species, and so we don’t really want them around.
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