• Question: what is your funniest moment in science?

    Asked by horseyeventer! to Carolyn, Peter, Richard, Sara, Siana on 18 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Carolyn Nielsen

      Carolyn Nielsen answered on 18 Nov 2015:

      In a lab I used to work in, my friend and I were both having problems with our experiments so didn’t ever have any good results to present at our weekly lab meeting with our supervisor. For some reason we had really amazing speakers hooked up to the desktop computer in our lab, so I used to blast the Imperial March (Darth Vader’s ominous theme from Star Wars) really loudly from YouTube as we walked out to lab meeting. It didn’t really make much sense because our supervisor was actually really nice, but it was always funny anyway 🙂

    • Photo: Sara Falcone

      Sara Falcone answered on 18 Nov 2015:

      Once I was having a lot of trouble with an experiment, it wouldn’t work. Like at all! Then one day it just magically worked: I have no idea why it worked that day but I was super happy and I was giggling with my collegues and a scientist from another group saying “see? I made it worked! And I just had to use my tears as reagent”. My colleagues started to laugh but the other dude looked at me very seriously and told me off because using tears might have contaminated the samples and walked away. He did not get that mine was just a joke and he’s reaction was so surrial that we laughed about it for days.

    • Photo: Richard Unwin

      Richard Unwin answered on 20 Nov 2015:

      Mines related to Carolyns, actually – I was once asked to give a presentation about my work to all the others members of our lab. They’re usually quite boring, especially the first few slides since most people know what you’re going to say as we’re working on similar things, so I wrote the entire introduction and showed it scrolling up the screen like the start of Star Wars (A long time ago, in a laboratory far, far away…), complete with the music!

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