• Question: how does you research benefit us?

    Asked by toffee4eva to Alexandra, Dean, Jess, Luisa, Sian on 18 Jun 2010 in Categories: . This question was also asked by ragustinh, rammyjammy.
    • Photo: Alexandra Kamins

      Alexandra Kamins answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      Zoonotic diseases (party-crashing viruses and bacteria that jump from species to species) are among the most deadly and damaging in the whole world!! Three-quarters of the diseases showing up in new places or for the first time are zoonotic diseases. Have you ever heard of swine flu? Ebola? SARS? Avian flu? All these came originally or still come from animals. What I do helps to answer the huge list of unknowns about these diseases, so that people around the world can learn to stop them before they ever get into people.

    • Photo: Dean Whittaker

      Dean Whittaker answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      We look at materials under high pressures. This can lead to better materials used in submarines (where you get to high pressures – and my friend is funded to look at a problem they have on submarines) or materials for other high pressure environments. Most of all, there’s a lot of our materials in the earth’s crust, so we can look at what that looks like and work out things to do with the crust.

    • Photo: Sian Foch-Gatrell

      Sian Foch-Gatrell answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      We are working towards a cleaner and hopefully cheaper energy

    • Photo: Jessica Housden

      Jessica Housden answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      Hi,

      Part of this is in a different answer too;

      Currently, we just don’t understand how our atmosphere works, and the only way to gather enough information is from Space. A spacecraft can orbit the Earth 16 times a day, and go over every single point on the Earth once a month. So, for two transatlantic flights (once they are in Space they don’t use carbon fuels), you can get information around the whole world. imagine trying to drive a car that distance ad the fuel that would use…
      Then, there are the benefits to us. So, Sky TV, sending world cup football matches to us live, talking over long distances, GPS positioning. These are all only possible because of the spacecraft that we have sent up.
      Another use is things like disaster monitoring – so, when the Asian Tsunami hit a satellite that we have sent up was able to take immediate measurements and photographs of the area to help emergency and aid workers go to the right places. In that sort of situation it would have taken many weeks to gather the same information without a spacecraft.

    • Photo: Luisa Ostertag

      Luisa Ostertag answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      Cardiovascular disease is at the moment the main reason for people dying all over Europe and the US. But it’s not only responsible for loads of deaths but also for many people being ill, taking time off work and needing treatment in hospital. All these thing are causing extremely high costs, which are mainly covered by tax payers who fund the national health system. Also it causes quite a bit of productivity loss (ill employees) for many companies.
      So if we reach our aim to get out a recommendation so we could say ‘Eat this amount of dark chocolate or cocoa every day and your risk for getting cardiovascular disease will decrease by xx %’ that would be a thing people could easily follow and it would (hopefully) prevent some cases of cardiovascular disease or at least make the disease start later in people’s life. Money could also be saved if cocoa or dark chocoate could replace some of the expensive medicines people with high blood pressure etc have to take.

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