Question: whats your favourite experiment?

Andrew Maynard answered on 25 Jun 2010:

Hi sibo1995,

That’s a really tough one. Some of the most fun experiments I did were at school and at university – as you get into more complex science, the experiments often get bigger and more complicated, so it’s hard to think of them separately. I did do some interesting work though with a very unique device built by a friend that allowed airborne fibres with different lengths to be pulled out of the air. In one end you put chopped up fibreglass – like the stuff you insulate lofts with – where the fibres were all different lengths, and out of the other end you could select fibres of just one length. We used this to investigate how to sample harmful asbestos fibres from the air. What was rather neat was that we were doing something no-one else had been able to do before.