• Question: If you could have any piece of scientific equipment, what would it be?

    Asked by Glorious nippon steel, folded over 1000 times to Cristiane, Nicki, Nikolai, Richard, Samuel on 17 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Richard Simons

      Richard Simons answered on 17 Mar 2015:

      Personally? or as part of my research?
      Personally, an SEM (Scanning electron microscope). It uses electrons to look at objects that are too small to be seen by light. You can also get some amazing images with a huge depth of field, which makes them look 3d – google “SEM Images” to see what I mean.

      For my research, I’d love an integrating sphere. This measures the intensity of light emitted from a point in all directions, so you can fully determine how much light is travelling in each direction. This would be super useful for me, but they’re quite expensive and I don’t REALLY need one, it’d just make my life easier

    • Photo: Nikolai Adamski

      Nikolai Adamski answered on 17 Mar 2015:

      To be honest, at our research institute we have a lot of top-of-the-line equipment (including an SEM 🙂 ; look at my work pictures).
      What we don’t have, we borrow or we send to a company to do something for us.
      Really the most important thing for me is to have a well-working glasshouse and field operation. If the plants aren’t happy, you won’t get good results. Simple as that. Luckily, our glasshouses etc are quite good.

      So I’m happy as a pig in the mud 😀

    • Photo: Samuel Ellis

      Samuel Ellis answered on 18 Mar 2015:

      Just like Nikolai, I have yet to come across any equipment I need which I can’t access where I work.

      As for what I might want instead of need.. well there are some cool robotic machines that can process lots of samples really quickly, often used in hospital labs for example. Something like that would be cool, just because I could be lazier and do less pipetting myself ha

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