• Question: What in your opinion is the most interesting science topic?

    Asked by kibo to Damien, Rachael, Simon, Suzi, Tim on 16 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by chloetaylorx, apc13, muncher, chloe1998, sophie11xoxo, ellen23saunders, meg0231.
    • Photo: Suzi Gage

      Suzi Gage answered on 10 Jun 2011:

      Hi @kibo and @chloetaylorx
      Thanks for this question – it’s tough!
      Science is so varied, and has an impact on so many different parts of life, the world, space and everything really 🙂
      I like watching TV shows about space exploration and the Universe, but I have always enjoyed working with people, so that is why I studied Psychology. It’s my favourite part of science because it is about US, so it means something to everyone.

      Within psychology, I like work on drugs and the mind the best I think (hence my own research!)

      Hope this answers you question 🙂

    • Photo: Rachael Ward

      Rachael Ward answered on 10 Jun 2011:

      Great question. To me, neuroscience has always been the most interesting topic. I remember realising how much I liked it during A-Level biology as we only covered it for a couple lessons and I complained to my teacher that we’d spent ages on “boring plants”! He was really interested in botany though so totally disagreed.

      The thing about neuroscience that still facinates me is that although the brain is right here (I’m banging on my forehead!) and it we still know so little about how it works. It does so much – controls our breathing, our movements, stores our memories, processes our senses… our mood and personality are dependent on the brain. How can it do such different and such important things? It’s just amazing.

      I could go on but we can chat about it next week!

    • Photo: Tim Fosker

      Tim Fosker answered on 10 Jun 2011:

      This is a tough question. I love trying to understand people and the amazing things that people can do using their brains. To me the way that most of us learn to speak and understand everyone else is amazing. Having worked with children with language difficulties, I’m not shocked by the difficulties they have – learning language is hard! However, I am surprised that more children don’t have these problems. How is it that most of us find it so easy to learn language? Understanding how we use our brains to learn language is incredibility interesting and it can also help us to help children who struggle to learn to speak or understand language.

    • Photo: Damien Hall

      Damien Hall answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      What I do is called sociolinguistics – the relationship between language and society, or between language and the people who speak it. I can’t think of a specific topic in sociolinguistics that I find more interesting than any other, but I think sociolinguistics itself is more interesting than other parts of linguistics because sociolinguistics is about PEOPLE – it’s often about making a scientific proof of something that we all already know just because we speak a language. So that’s interesting, because it’s sometimes not finding out new facts, but instead looking at things that we KNOW are true and finding out WHY that is. It’s practical, and I love that!

Comments