Because we are looking at cancer and trying to work out what causes it, and why a normal cell might start to turn into a cancer cell, we look a lot at cancer samples.
Mainly the types of cancer samples we look at are prostate cancer and breast cancer. When these people have surgery to remove the cancer, they can choose to give some of their cancer tissue to research, which helps us because then we have samples to test!
Not all scientists test ‘samples’ at all. Geologists and biologists do, but a ‘sample’ is something that you either have to get from “the field” (scientist speak for ‘somewhere out there in the world’) or something you make in the lab that is supposed to be the same as a real thing from the field.
Physicists who want to study the early history of the universe (the first few minutes after the Big Bang) try to re-create those very high temperatures/energies using huge machines that smash particles (protons, electrons, or other bits of atoms) together really really hard.
Astronomers studying galaxies, black holes, or things like that, however, can’t really get their hands on anything to ‘test’ at all! So we have to rely on very powerful telescopes to look at the galaxies or black holes or whatever else, because we can’t get a “sample in the lab”. (That’s also why astronomers don’t have labs at all.)
awesomekid
Hi awesomekid,
Because we are looking at cancer and trying to work out what causes it, and why a normal cell might start to turn into a cancer cell, we look a lot at cancer samples.
Mainly the types of cancer samples we look at are prostate cancer and breast cancer. When these people have surgery to remove the cancer, they can choose to give some of their cancer tissue to research, which helps us because then we have samples to test!
0
Hi awesomekid,
Not all scientists test ‘samples’ at all. Geologists and biologists do, but a ‘sample’ is something that you either have to get from “the field” (scientist speak for ‘somewhere out there in the world’) or something you make in the lab that is supposed to be the same as a real thing from the field.
Physicists who want to study the early history of the universe (the first few minutes after the Big Bang) try to re-create those very high temperatures/energies using huge machines that smash particles (protons, electrons, or other bits of atoms) together really really hard.
Astronomers studying galaxies, black holes, or things like that, however, can’t really get their hands on anything to ‘test’ at all! So we have to rely on very powerful telescopes to look at the galaxies or black holes or whatever else, because we can’t get a “sample in the lab”. (That’s also why astronomers don’t have labs at all.)
0