• Question: What wasthe coolest thing ever got to break and put back together? Your joke was very clever my friends laughed for a while!!

    Asked by 466kvna25Miriam to David, Lisa on 9 Nov 2014. This question was also asked by Rachael.
    • Photo: David Taylor

      David Taylor answered on 9 Nov 2014:

      I’m glad you got the joke. There are lots of jokes like that you and you can even make them up yourself. (What do you call a boy who is very tall? Myles Long…I just thought of that!).
      The coolest thing I ever broke? Well, I once got to throw a bicycle from a third floor window (I can tell you why if you like). And smashing windows is fun: I’ve done a lot of tests for Irish Rail who want to make sure their window glass is strong enough.
      Just lately I’ve been doing research on the legs of insects, such as locusts and cockroaches. They can be pretty gross (especially cockroaches) but it’s interesting to study how they make their legs to be so thin and slender, and yet strong enough to support them. When you bend an insect’s leg it buckles (you can do the same with a plastic drinking straw) but then when you let go it springs back straight again.

    • Photo: Lisa Phelan

      Lisa Phelan answered on 9 Nov 2014:

      Well I guess he never got back together, I smashed a blue bottle fly and sprayed it with gold and put it inside a vacuum chamber so I could look at it under a scanning electron microscope, just Googled it there, something similar to this http://www.sciencephoto.com/media/369521/view
      Except, because I intentionally smashed my fly it didn’t look so pretty!
      That was a day I was bored during my research masters!

      In work we build test fixtures all the time, and it’s like a jigsaw… You need every piece so patience is a virtue…. Unfortunately I don’t have but am working on it!

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