Question: Have you made any new discoveries in your field of science?

Asked by alina to Brad, Chris, Goli, Herbert, Kate on 16 May 2012. This question was also asked by tayla07.

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  1. Photo: Kate TrinajsticKate Trinajstic
    answered on 16 May 2012:

    I discovered that some primitive fish had live birth and internal fertilization. This was really unexpected because we tend to think of live birth as an advanced morphology. This has really changed the idea of what so called primitive animals were like. It also told us a bit about behavior in fossils for the first time – if you have internal fertilization then you need mating behaviors

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  2. Photo: Brad TuckerBrad Tucker
    answered on 16 May 2012:

    I worked on the group that discovered the Universe was expanding faster and faster. We’ve known since 1920 that the Universe was expanding, but we’d thought gravity would slow its expansion, eventually stopping it and then collapsing the Universe back in itself, in a reverse Big Bang. However, we found that instead, a new force which counter-acted gravity existed was causing the Universe to grow faster and faster, meaning it will mostly likely grow forever.

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  3. Photo: Goli SamimiGoli Samimi
    answered on 17 May 2012:

    We discover new things all the time, but usually in cancer research we solve small questions that add up to a big solution. I’ve discovered some proteins in ovarian cancer that can be targeted to stop it from spreading, which should help patients survive better.

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  4. Photo: Herbert ChiouHerbert Chiou
    answered on 17 May 2012:

    I am not in a position right now to do many new discoveries. My role right now is to use existing knowledge and applying them to make new products, and test them. In my previous roles (part of my PhD studies), I did discover a different group of sugar chain lengths in rice starch. We believe this may help to understand the starch is formed during the growing process.

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  5. Photo: Chris SlapeChris Slape
    answered on 19 May 2012:

    Like Goli, I’ve discovered lots of new things, but most of them are relatively small. My current work shows that when some leukemic cells die, they can send signals telling the surviving cells to grow faster, and that makes the leukemia more aggressive. This is the opposite of what most people believe (it has always been thought that leukemic cells dying is a good thing!), so that’s a fairly important discovery.

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