• Question: What’s the coolest thing you have seen

    Asked by RobertG on 7 Dec 2021.
    • Photo: Justine Mathoux

      Justine Mathoux answered on 16 Nov 2021:


      Colored Neurons by fluorescence in a mice brain slice. You can see every part of the neuron, that is common in Biology but the first time I saw that, I found it really cool.

    • Photo: Gaël Lymer

      Gaël Lymer answered on 16 Nov 2021:


      Bonjour 🙂
      A few cool things I have seen while travelling for research, so you can choose 🙂

      – I have seen a green flash once from a ship in the Atlantic Ocean, that happens when the top tip of the sun turns green as an optical illusion during sunset, you can see one in the movie “Pirates of the Caribbeans III” 😉
      – I have seen a few whales, turtles and dolphins while at sea: the dolphins playing in the waves around the ship’s hull are quite cool
      – I have seen/felt an earthquake while in a hotel in Japan, but the hotel building was equipped to be protected from earthquakes, so I could feel the tower balancing slowly, and see the other buildings around me moving as well from my window 🙂 it was like they were dancing ^^

    • Photo: Daniela Costa

      Daniela Costa answered on 16 Nov 2021:


      I’ve worked with endothelial cells. I was mesmerized when I saw them forming little rings, as per angiogenesis. Such a beautiful moment!

    • Photo: Pawel Rulikowski

      Pawel Rulikowski answered on 16 Nov 2021:


      Good question and difficult to answer because “coolness” of something is very subjective, what I like does not necessarily need to be “cool” for you.
      While at sea I have seen aurora borealis (northern lights) shimmering over the ocean at night. I have see massive container ships hundreds of meters long tossed in storm seas like toys, taking head-on waves. I have see up close sheer size of aircraft carrier. I have seen whales traveling across the ocean.
      In my work I have seen through the electron microscope roughness of metal surfaces, that looks a bit like cauliflower!

    • Photo: Md Kamruzzaman

      Md Kamruzzaman answered on 16 Nov 2021:


      Real time transformation of a pharmaceutical ingredients from one state to another state and capturing image. It was really incredible to witness such changes at the microscopic level!

    • Photo: Ohood Alharbi

      Ohood Alharbi answered on 16 Nov 2021:


      I worked in Parasitology lab, and part of my job was semen examination which includes counting and examining activty. It is fascinating to see what we were created from, I saw deformed shapes and two head sperms.

      Another fascinating studies which is not seen by eye, is the effect of immigration on genetic changes and how our daily life activities affect how we inherit behaviours. For example, people after the Neolithic time immigrated and started herding and thus their genetic changed and these changes allowed persistence production of the enzyme responsible for digesting lactose in milk and thus it allowed them to consume milk, The location of the genetic code that changed were different among cultures based on the type of milk was consumed (cow milk, vs canal milk, vs goat or sheep milk, etc.)

    • Photo: Cyrille Thinnes

      Cyrille Thinnes answered on 17 Nov 2021:


      Hi Robert, in the lab the coolest thing I have seen was my first experiment on cells under the microscope. I wanted to know if cancer cells will grow when I put them together with the molecule I made. It is a fairly long process and you put different colours in there too that stick to specific parts of the cell to help you understand what is going on. However, I did not really know what to expect when looking under the microscope. So I was overwhelmed when I saw how some cells stopped growing, how they reacted differently to my molecules by having different colours light up, and how different molecules did different things. It was so great to not only see how the hard work I had done previously had actual results in biology, but also it was super pretty to see it happen under the microscope!

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