Question: What is your favourite experiment so far?

Helena Quilter answered on 9 Mar 2016:

Great question, thanks! I do lots of experiments every day and a lot of them are the same and I have to them over and over again so they get a bit boring! Sometimes they’re very exciting though – last week I did a reaction where I was adding oxygen as a gas into my pinene to make it more active (that’s a chemical that comes from pine trees) and it started glowing bright blue! That was really exciting.

I think my very favourite experiment I’ve ever done wasn’t really to do with my work at the minute but for a workshop I ran in a school where we used liquid nitrogen to make ice cream! Liquid nitrogen is nitrogen that has been cooled down so much it becomes a liquid (nitrogen is a gas normally). It’s one of the coldest things on Earth (-196 degrees Celsius!) and freezes things really quickly. We added it to cream, milk and sugar and stirred like mad and it all froze and turned into super creamy delicious ice cream! I think it was tastier than normal because it froze so quickly that there wasn’t time for ice crystals to grow in it so it was much smoother. Yum! 🙂