I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Boron Zone. It has a range of scientists studying all different topics. Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
Not my discoveries, but my ideas. That is one of the issues in science… you have an idea and you apply for funds to research it and by doing so you have to advertise your idea. It happens to often for man y people to have the same idea at the same time. But that is the way it goes.
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Yes, occasionally! We have had an idea, get some results, and then in the process of writing about it for publication we have found out that in the meantime someone else has had a similar idea and gotten similar results! It is annoying, but is not so surprising when there are several people working in a similar area.
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Almost – we currently have a situation where two groups are claiming the discovery of a planet in the habitable zone of its star. I’m a member of one of the groups. Most likely what will happen is we will be called co-discoverers, although I know some in both teams won’t be happy with that!
As Mark said, sometimes other people come with the same ideas, or occasionally steal them and try to take the credit. That can be very frustrating, although luckily I’ve never really had the latter happen to me.
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As in any competitive environment where either money or prestige is at stake, you can get individuals who may take your ideas. Fortunately it has never happened to me.
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Not so much people taking my ideas, but I’ve had the experience that Matthew mentioned, where I found out that someone else had been doing the same thing as me without me (or them) knowing about it. There are so many scientists in the world you can’t really avoid this sort of thing happening. When you start research on a new project, you always do what’s called a “literature review” first – that means you read lots of papers to find out what has been done already, so you try to avoid doing the same thing. Talking to other people working in the same area is important too.
I often think there must be a lot of overlap between work done in the English-speaking science world, and work done in the Chinese-speaking science world. English is generally accepted as the language for scientific publications, but a lot of science is published in Chinese (also Russian). Without an English translation I have no way of knowing what the Chinese scientists are doing.
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