• Question: what is your theory/what exactly are you trying to develop or make better?

    Asked by Jacob1010101 to Hummy, Lewis, James, Sandra on 14 Mar 2017.
    • Photo: Lewis Wright

      Lewis Wright answered on 14 Mar 2017:

      The long term aim of my research is to produce solar panels as quickly, cheaply, and easily as possible.

      A major factor stopping people from buying solar panels is the price. This is because whatever material it’s made from, the process they use to make them takes a long time, a lot of energy, or cannot be made in large quantities.

      My material is made from common elements (so the ingredients are cheap to buy), it takes just a couple of days to make a cell (which means you can produce a lot quickly), and spraying my solutions means it isn’t wasteful and doesn’t need a lot of room to set up.

      By making it easy and cheap for a company to start producing solar panels, the company can sell them for less, as they don’t have a lot of startup costs to earn back.

      The cheaper solar panels are to make, the cheaper they are to buy, and the fewer fossil fuels we will all use 🙂

    • Photo: Sandra Greive

      Sandra Greive answered on 15 Mar 2017:

      My theory is that the portal protein can be engineered to be a very stable nanopore with exactly whatever diameter for the inner pore that we want. I propose that this could make a really really useful fast, cheap and accurate way of mapping DNA to help doctors track changes in cancer cells as they are treated. Now I just have to prove it. So far we have shown that it can be heated to 70 degrees Celsius and it is still a donut shape. We can even put it in really harsh salty conditions and it still works….. Next step can we do this for days on end have it still work?

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