• Question: Do you think your work (in the future) could help the world in huge ways?

    Asked by SD1901 to Anna, James, Joe, Leonie, Olivia on 16 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 16 Mar 2015:

      Hi SD1901

      I hope that my work will have really important impacts on how we understand climate change.

      Sea ice plays a vitally important role in our climate system, and at present it may be reducing the impact of climate change on Antarctica, and reducing ice sheet melt. I hope that my research will improve how we understand Antarctic sea ice and as a result we will be better able to predict what will happen to it over the coming decades and therefore improve our ability to predict how climate change will affect Antarctic ice sheets which will affect global sea levels.

    • Photo: Olivia Lynes

      Olivia Lynes answered on 16 Mar 2015:

      Like all scientists I hope that will be the case! But in reality in research you study such small bits of science that to the wider world it doesn’t seem to make much difference.

      But I do think that we are doing the right thing by trying to find a way to deal with nuclear waste, once we can deal with the waste nuclear becomes a viable alternative to fossil fuel. Something everyone agrees that we need.

    • Photo: Leonie Oostwoud Wijdenes

      Leonie Oostwoud Wijdenes answered on 16 Mar 2015:

      I hope that my work will help to understand what information we use, and how we use this information to move. Once we understand this, it could help developing treatment for people who have trouble moving because of a brain disease. This knowledge could also help us to build robots to do things for us that so far only humans can do.

    • Photo: Anna Ashton

      Anna Ashton answered on 16 Mar 2015:

      I’m not sure about helping in huge ways, but I hope it will help in some way.

      Like a lot of science it’s hard to see how useful your work will be at the time, quite often it’s not until a long time in the future that it’s real value can be seen. This is why nobel prizes are often awarded to work that has been done a while ago, because it’s only now that it’s true greatness and far-reaching consequences are appreciated.

      I hope that my work will help us understand how the hormone melatonin is made. Decreased amounts of this hormone have been linked to a number of diseases, including diabetes. So I hope I might play a part in unpicking the mechanisms behind this.

    • Photo: Joe Spencer

      Joe Spencer answered on 17 Mar 2015:

      I hope all my work both now and future will help the world.
      I work on nanotechnology, making the smallest possible structures which have applications in electronics to make computers and phones operates 100’s if not 1000’s of times faster than they currently do.
      Faster computers is good for everyone, as it means complex numerical simulations would spit out answers quicker (like cures for diseases, modelling work for various problems in the world) So my work may form the basis to help lots of other people with their work as well

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