Have you made any fascinating discoveries?

Question: Have you made any fascinating discoveries?
- Keywords:
  achievement,
  discovery
Asked by anon-294524 on 20 May 2021.
- Deborah Hunter answered on 20 May 2021:
  
  Yes! I absolutely love your question.
  
  Scientists such as myself have a passion for discovering the unknown i.e. the Mysteries of the Universe.
  
  My contribution to Astronomy & Astrophysics was to make discoveries about the physical and chemical properties of an enormous star before it went Supernova (as well as it’s surrounding host galaxy).
  
  I was able to perform Spectroscopy & Photometry and to analyze images taken from large Telescopes all around the world (e.g. Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii). Once I collated the results, I was able to determine the size and mass of the Progenitor star. I found it to be Carbon-rich (like Diamond) and the size was likely to be greater than 15 times the mass of our Sun!
  
  Wow, it’s amazing we have such beautiful stellar objects in our wonderful and mysterious Universe 🙂
  
  Dr Deborah Hunter
  
  (MSci, PhD in Astrophysics)
- Jennifer Graham answered on 20 May 2021:
  
  Fascinating is in the eye of the beholder, so I’ll let you be the judge of whether this is fascinating or not
  I’m working on a project at the moment where we have prepared our sample two different ways – one in an oven and one in a microwave. For some reason these show completely different structural and magnetic behaviour even though they are the same material to begin with! I find this completely amazing because in our research this is quite a common problem and everyone just assumes their sample is better than the other groups and they’ve obviously made some mistakes. But what we think is that there are some other factors involved, like the way you cook it, and now we want to find out why!
- Axel Moore answered on 20 May 2021:
  
  Well, I certainly think I have made a fascinating discovery :). Let me give you a short story.
  
  Mick is a 23 year old athlete that competes in crossfit (a form of training that involves gymnastics, endurance, and olympic lifting). During training one afternoon her knee suddenly locked up and she couldn’t bend it, and not because of pain but rather a physical obstruction. Mick went to the doctor, who send her for x-rays and then an MRI and said she had a loose osteochondral fragment (cartilage and bone) and that she would need surgery to repair this. Mick was given several options for repairing her joint but she wanted the one with the best outcomes and fastest return to sport, an osteochondral allograft (cartilage and bone taken from a recently deceased person). It took several weeks to source the allograft and set up the appointment; during this time Mick was essentially on bed rest or hobbled around with crutches. The surgical process was very quick, taking only a few hours under anesthesia. When she awoke she began a training regime to regain mobility, strength, and load bearing in her knee. Her return to sport began ~3 weeks after her surgery, a very fast recovery.
  
  Mick had a very good outcome from this procedure; however, the allograft procedure is not available everywhere and even in the US where this treatment is very accessible it took several weeks to find a graft. What I have developed is a graft that mimics the biomechanics of cartilage and bone and can be used off-the-shelf. This means Mick could have gone to A&E on the day of pain and had surgery the next day and would have been back to crossfit much sooner.
  
  We are now preparing a pivotal large animal study to evaluate this graft before taking it to a first in human trial.
- John Grasmeder answered on 20 May 2021:
  
  We discovered a way to make people’s broken bones heal faster. Often when someone breaks a bone in their arm or leg, a metal plate is screwed onto the bone to hold it together while it heals. That can take 6 – 9 months, sometimes longer, depending upon the person’s health, age and their weight. Sometimes, it takes so long that the metal plate breaks through fatigue and has to be replaced in a second operation. We discovered that if you replace metal plates with ones made from carbon fibre composites, the bone can heal up to twice as quickly. Not only that but carbon fibre composite plates have up to 10 times the fatigue strength of metal plates, so they don’t break even if they are in the body for a long time.
- Jordan Bestwick answered on 20 May 2021:
  
  A couple of years ago I was digging for fossils in Canada and I found a piece of fossilised tree sap, known as amber. It was the size of my little finger nail and was around 72 million years old, so as old as many dinosaurs! Amber is very rare and so this was a very special find. I donated it to the nearby museum so that other people could learn from it.
- Jamil Jubrail answered on 20 May 2021:
  
  I think it depends on what fascinates you. We recently discovered for the first time in over twenty years two key proteins that the common cold virus uses to infect immune cells in the tissues. Importantly, by using these proteins the virus prevents the immune cell from being able to then control any other germ that invades the area. This is important for people with diseases like asthma who suffer with these infections all the time. Our work is now being trialled in a new treatment to overcome these colds and could one day pave the way for a vaccine.
- Emma Yhnell answered on 23 May 2021:
  
  We discovered that computer games might help with brain disease

Question: Have you made any fascinating discoveries?

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