• Question: If you could have any one of your own questions about science answered then what would it be?

    Asked by anon-292586 to Sian, Ross, Rosie, Rebecca, Carmen on 20 Apr 2021.
    • Photo: Rosie Goodburn

      Rosie Goodburn answered on 20 Apr 2021:

      It’s not my field, but I’m curious about the apparent dark energy: something observed by astronomers that seems to make the Universe expand faster all the time and some scientists guess that it accounts for 68 per cent of the Universe.

      The nature of dark energy is still a complete mystery – I’d love to see if physicists could figure out what’s going on there!

    • Photo: Ross Low

      Ross Low answered on 23 Apr 2021:

      I would love to know about how life started on Earth (abiogenesis). We think that all life came from a single ancestor but we actually have no way to check (without a time machine).

Comments

  • Photo: Steve

    Steve commented on :

    This is a great Q and took a lot of thinking about!

    I’d love to be able to take a virtual reality tour on the top of a cell surface and see exactly how all the proteins are organised – especially the receptors I’m interested in – and watch the drugs stick to them and how they move in the cell. This would mean I could work out how to design a better medicine that would work with fewer side effects.

    We can sort of do this with microscopes, but we have to assume lots of things and the microscopes sometimes just aren’t powerful enough.

  • Photo: Ed

    Ed commented on :

    I want to know if you can make a conscious computer. The thought experiment goes like this:

    1. the brain is the source of human thoughts.
    2. If the brain is just a really complex computer, and we changed one tiny part with a computer chip nothing would change.
    2. If we keep replacing the brain with bits of computer then could we end up with a ‘thinking’ computer.

  • Photo: Lucile

    Lucile commented on :

    This is a great question!

    What I am very curious about at the moment and would love to know is how the different human species got on with each other during Prehistory. Recently, scientists have shown that about 50-40 thousands years ago, there were several different human species that lived in Eurasia (Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo sapiens, and also another undefined species). DNA studies have shown that some of these species were actually in contact with each other, enough to have children together. So I would be really curious to know:

    – Could they understand each other through some sort of common speech?
    – Did they share their knowledge on hunting/making tools, teach each other new things?
    – Did they live in the same places, or only met randomly when moving between camps seasonally?