• Question: what is the funniest thing that has happened to you in a experiment?

    Asked by badlads2k6 to Alastair, Emma, Hywel, Keith, Vicki on 17 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Alastair Sloan

      Alastair Sloan answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      I was once being filmed by Sky News starting an experiment and they had asked me to pipette some sodium hydroxide from a bottle onto a dish which was under a microscope while I kept looking under the microscope. I was pipetting the liquid while starting down the microscope at the centre of the dish, but couldn’t see the liquid on the dish. That was because I was “expertly” pipetting the liquid all over the table and my jeans!!! The reporter was giggling so much she couldnt speak and I was soaked!

    • Photo: Vicki Stevenson

      Vicki Stevenson answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      I was doing a very simple experiment as a demonstration in a room of 50 people. The experiment is to tell the difference between a raw and a boiled egg. If you spin both eggs then touch them lightly to stop the spinning, the raw egg will start spinning again (the momentum of the yolk spinning inside the egg is enough to get it moving). Unfortunately I spun the egg a bit too hard and was worried it might slip off the desk – I tried to catch the egg but instead crushed it! lots of raw egg all over the desk, and 50 people laughing! At least I had correctly predicted it was the raw egg before I broke it!

    • Photo: Keith Brain

      Keith Brain answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      We often have students sitting in, helping, or doing experiments with us. In one particularly experiment, we were looking at the wall of the vas deferens (which is part of the male reproductive tract) under a microscope, looking for the nerves. One of the students, left on her own for a while, became very excited, telling as that she had seen the nerves moving about all by themselves … closer inspection revealed that instead of studying a nerve, she had been carefully watching the gyrations of a mouse sperm that happened to be floating by. We both had a wry smile, and moved quickly on.

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