• Question: What thing do you do in your personal life related to science?

    Asked by anon-257247 on 16 Jun 2020.
    • Photo: Emma Daniels

      Emma Daniels answered on 16 Jun 2020:

      Ohh great question! I don’t have many hobbies that are directly related to science.. my main hobby is dancing! But I do like to bake and that’s kind of similar to doing chemistry?! In the sense that you have to follow a recipe, and to do a chemical reaction you have to follow a synthetic procedure. Also, the process of baking a cake involves a chemical reaction called the Maillard reaction. This reaction takes place between sugars and proteins or amino acids in the cake mixture and leads to the lovely golden colour of a well baked cake! It’s also responsible for forming the crust on bread!

      I’m excited to see what the other scientists say – There’s so many examples of science in everyday life!

    • Photo: Craig Johnson

      Craig Johnson answered on 16 Jun 2020:

      Hi @Nicobarnett, nice question! When I’m at home, I read quite a bit of popular science-y books related to what I do. My recent favourites have been “All That Remains” by Prof Dame Sue Black and “Stiff” by Mary Roach – they both take a look at death and life beyond death from very different view points and are very informative.

      If your question is more of a “where do I use my science day-to-day”, then one way that what I do stick in my head is that when I’m preparing dinner, I’m always considering anatomy when I’m cutting up meat – carving a chicken is a great way to get to grips with the structure of muscles, the skeleton, and how different organisms/animals are adapted differently. Beyond that, I can’t help but watch the way people walk around and go about their business and noticing the way everyone’s bodies move and what muscles, nerves and other structures are doing to control that movement.

    • Photo: Alex Holmes

      Alex Holmes answered on 16 Jun 2020:

      Ohh! I do pottery as a hobby, and that’s all different kinds of chemistry and physics!

      When the clay is spinning on the wheel i have to make sure it’s damp enough so there’s not too much friction, I have to balance the force of my hands on the inside and outside to draw the clay up in the right shape and not make it too thin.
      Then as the clay dries the water evaporates out of it and it shrinks, that’s actually one of the ways we can attach handles and things like that – put very wet clay between two drier pieces and as the very wet clay dries it shrinks and pulls the two pieces together so they knit together!
      When you then fire the clay the first time it changes its properties from clay that could be redissolved in water to clay that can’t be, and it also makes the clay able to suck in water.
      We then also glaze this type of clay to add colours and this is all chemistry! what elements you put in and what environment they will be in determine the colours! Some elements can actually make tonnes of different colours just from the same starting material!
      When you fire the clay for the last time with the glaze there are all sorts of reactions going on! At one point the clay gets so hot that all the crystals of silica change shape and shrink – this can make your whole clay object smaller by 1/8th!! just because crystals move about in it! Also the glaze melts into a glass to over the surface and make it shiny.

      I don’t do pottery for the science – i just like making things – but when i think about what’s going on it’s so cool

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