• Question: have you ever discovered something that no one has ever discovered before if you did how did you handle it?

    Asked by sned532kyat32 on 26 Mar 2026.
    • Photo: Andrew McDowall

      Andrew McDowall answered on 26 Mar 2026:

      I’ve made a fair number of new materials that no-one had made previously, or that no-one had reported making previously. Unfortunately they mostly weren’t that interesting. No particularly useful properties or interesting structures. For the few that did we collated the data and published the findings and results in scientific journals, so that others could know of them and build on the results is they wanted to.

      Sadly no Eureka! moments for me, knowledge mostly advances in small steps, not great leaps.

    • Photo: Daniel Chernick

      Daniel Chernick answered on 27 Mar 2026:

      The ‘new’ stuff that I’ve discovered is mostly known materials that are good in specific applications.

      I was doing a PhD, looking into how ammonia (the main stinky chemical in cat wee) particles can be captured within other materials – mostly wastes and residues because that’s what I’m interested in.

      I looked at coconut husks, tree barks and a few other things. I also looked at how the performances of these materials changed when you pyrolysed (burn them in the absence of oxygen to make biochar) or acid-washed them.

      In a lot of the literature, the main materials used for this type of particle capture (called adsorption) are generally biochars as they’re quite a cheap material to make (and it’s also good for sustainability).

      From my work, I found that the untreated tree barks (those not burned or acid-washed) actually performed the best. And I found that really really interested because so much tree bark is just ignored and left to rot in forests, and there’s actually a potentially really valuable use for them!

      I handled it by being excited (and trying to publish the work)!

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