• Question: what is the most interesting thing you have seen or made, what was its use and did you make it up randomly or did you do it over time ?

    Asked by kyes533dorm47 on 7 Nov 2025.
    • Photo: Alana McNulty

      Alana McNulty answered on 7 Nov 2025:

      The most interesting thing I’ve seen has got to be a nuclear power station. There are so many areas that are fascinating in different ways, such as the pile cap (the area above the reactors where they can be refuelled and all the movements of fuel happen in remote facilities), the spent fuel cooling ponds (where really radioactive nuclear fuel is cooled down before it’s transported away from site) and the turbine hall (a massive area where huge turbines are housed that are used to generate electricity from the heat produced by a nuclear reaction). There are lots of other equally cool areas and systems too!
      So it’s not something that I’ve made in particular, but I find it fascinating the science and engineering behind each area and the time and knowledge that went into building the station and coming up with how it should all work.

    • Photo: Eleanor Merson

      Eleanor Merson answered on 10 Nov 2025:

      I helped to make a fire curtain that had a coating that expanded suddenly when it got hot – like popcorn! Things that have a lot of air in them (like popcorn) are very good thermal insulators. This is very important for a fire curtain. Because of this coating, the curtain could last up to 4 hours in a fire, so that there was plenty of time for people to get out of the building.

    • Photo: Stephen Raggett-Batchen

      Stephen Raggett-Batchen answered on 10 Nov 2025:

      The most interesting thing I have seen is visits to site when projects I have been working on have been getting constructed. It is always great to see your designs from drawings come to life – they are always a lot bigger than you imagine! My most recent visit on site was to an area of the HS2 project where they are building tunnels for the trains to pass through – they are the size of cathedrals inside – the scale is immense.

    • Photo: Charlotte Maughan Jones

      Charlotte Maughan Jones answered on 10 Nov 2025:

      One of my colleagues once took an x-ray of a rubiks cube which was pretty cool! I didn’t realise it had loads of springs and things inside of it. That’s the coolest thing about x-rays, that you can see stuff inside of things that normally you would have to break open to discover.

      Most research takes a long time though. The best thing i ever made was actually quite boring, in that it was a really great piece of code that analysed x-ray images in a way that hadn’t been done before. It is still used and i was pretty proud of it because i’m not the best at coding (i find it hard), but it worked really well. It took me months and months to write it, and the idea for it came from discussions with colleagues before that because of problems they had been having with certain x-ray images.

    • Photo: Amal Lavender

      Amal Lavender answered on 13 Nov 2025:

      wow epic question. the most interesting thing for me back as a kid and probably still now are aircraft for me how we invented them, how they have evolved and thats ultimately what got me into engineering! personally im still proud of a wine rack i made from recycled wood in school and my house DIY projects. at work its been improving a packing machine’s output by over 25% and to what i’ve seen that is definately at work now from atomic clocks to sound chambers!

    • Photo: Paul Trusty

      Paul Trusty answered on 14 Nov 2025:

      I am working on an inhaler for asthma, but it is made out of cardboard instead of plastic! I didn’t make it up, it was invented by my client. I am helping with the materials science part of the project.

    • Photo: Caroline Roche

      Caroline Roche answered on 21 Nov 2025:

      The most interesting thing I’ve seen is a holographic display go clear to reveal the control room. What I thought was just a wall with a holographic light display of some of the components used on the site was actually a glass wall that could be changed to show or hide the control room from the visitors area. It was really cool to see and totally unexpected, but a great way to show off the control room without bothering the people running the site.

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