Rosetta for me, scientifically, is the whole package On choosing a comet With Rosetta, we were going to go to a comet, now we had to select a particular comet, and there are a particular class of comets called periodic comets.  Comet Halley was the first periodic comet that was discovered. Basically, we can reproduce its orbit over years, we know its going...

DNA is only part of the answer to how biology actually works You know, that’s an incredibly hard question, it would be like asking me what is my favourite opera.  I mean, how do you go about comparing Janacek with Benjamin Britten, with Strauss, with Mozart, Tchaikovsky, I don’t know, Monteverdi, Jesus, I mean, you know, how can you do it? Reinhard Kaiser!  You...

  Their cat coughed this up and they thought that I might like it. So, in my hands here I have something called Trichuris; these are whip worms so these many, many whip worms, thousands of whip worms in there, don’t know if you can see them. So, these are a parasite that we study a lot in Manchester, so whip worms affect one...

For any scientist it’s incredibly exciting to discover something new. For any scientist it’s incredibly exciting to discover something new and just know that you’re the only person who really understands some new scientific principle or some observation.  So it’s kind of exciting, it’s like having a secret treasure, if you can make something out of it. However, when you take it to the...

It started with Giotto about 30 years ago… On the beginnings of Rosetta It started with Giotto about 30 years ago, ESA’s first deep space mission which flew past Halley’s comet in 1986.  At that point, we knew already what we had to do next.  Giotto flew very quickly past Halley, at hundreds of kilometres a second; we needed to get next to a...

  These are guys that should be spoken in the same breath as Einstein and Newton and Galileo and Darwin Many of the ancient Greek philosophers are household names, so Plato, Aristotle, and these were great thinkers.  Very often we think once the period of the ancient Greeks, the golden age of the ancient Greeks, ended with the fall of Rome and so, you...

What I discovered when I did that was actually people didn’t really understand starch. Why do I like this?  I think because it’s one way of making sense of things.  So as a microscopist I look at the packing: how molecules and larger structures pack together.  And then you want to know how that impacts on the end products, and that might also include...

  To some degree, we lost our link to nature On people’s responses to climate When we look at past and modern society, in the past everybody that was working was a farmer, and that was before industrialisation kicked in, people were extremely dependent on grain yields or agricultural output. Also, transport means were quite different, so if there was a drought in some...

The answer lies in quantum theory Well, the modern atom, the map of the atom as an atomic nucleus with electrons going around it, that was only discovered at the start of the 20th century in Manchester amongst other places: Ernest Rutherford famously discovered the atomic nucleus.  So this idea of the atom as a solar system is a 20th century idea.  If you...

With these kinds of tiny things you can contribute a lot. Our work helps modelling approaches or modellers that actually try to understand how current climate change is going to affect our society in the near future, or does already affect us.  For example, when we look to paleoclimate records, and it’s very well dated, we pretty much know when things happened, you can...

Earlier this year, Cosmic Genome host Robin Ince went along to take part in an experiment on brain activity being conducted at University College London.  The UCL team have been monitoring the brain’s activity during improvisation and playing a version of the BBC show ‘Just a Minute’ with a number of people, particularly comedians, to see how their brains work compared to ‘normal’ people. ...

Professor Carlos Frenk asks the age old brain bender: If the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into? So that’s the same question as what was there before the Big Bang.  So let me tell you a story.  When I was about 13 years old, I don’t understand why I was there, I went to a lecture…I must have been a precocious child…I...

I think that thats just a brilliant field of work My phD came under the umbrella of cancer research.   I was looking at it on a molecular level, I was looking at the pathways and at the genes that can go wrong and can cause cells to over divide, to not be able to regulate their cell division pathway. People often ask me,...

During this year’s QED Conference in Manchester the Cosmic Genome team gave attendees the chance to tweet in, ask us at The CG desk, or even ask on camera, a question to a select few scientists from the Cosmic Genome App.  Professor Jon Butterworth Question - Hi, my name’s James Lennox-Gordon [@JLennoxG on Twitter], and my question is: at school we’re taught that a...

During this year’s QED Conference in Manchester, the Cosmic Genome team gave attendees the chance to tweet in, ask us at the CG desk, or even ask on camera, a question to a select few scientists from the Cosmic Genome App.  Dr Brenna Hassett Question - Hello, I’m Jo from Oxford Skeptics in the Pub, I have a very simple but confusing question: why...