Question: hi again, im starting to like you and i was wondering what could be done to try and cut back Co2? and what are scientists working on to try make teqchnology bigger and better?

Amelia Markey answered on 14 Jun 2011:

Hi and thank you! 🙂

Well a lot of money is going into environmental research. This isn’t really my area but a lot of people work on ways of cleaning up the environment and better ways to generate energy that won’t cause so many environmental problems and will be more sustainable (i.e. won’t run out as fast).

Things you can do is to try and recycle as much as possible, use “greener” methods of transport such as bikes and walking rather than cars, make sure you turn off lights, tvs, computers etc if you are not using them, use more eco-friendly light bulbs, and plant lots of trees (they love CO2!)

If you want to know more this is a really good website:

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Environmentandgreenerliving/Thewiderenvironment/index.htm

As for making technology bigger and better, my work involves making things smaller and better 😉 Everybody likes things to be nice and compact so that they are easy to carry around if you need and will fit into labs better. Having said that I’ve just been to a talk today about a big robot that is in one of the buildings at Manchester which I think he said weighs 6 tonnes!!!!! It’s pretty cool and rather than explain (badly) here’s a link with some videos that show the robots in action!!! 🙂

http://www.coebp.ls.manchester.ac.uk/workwithus/facilities/index.asp

Hope that answers your questions. Please comment if you want to know more.