What area would you know more about if you could?

Question: What area would you know more about if you could?
- Keywords:
  discovery,
  research,
  work
Asked by to Daren, Lynne, Phillip, Simon on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
- Simon Redfern answered on 16 Jun 2014:
  
  I’d really like to understand how life operates at a cellular level – what makes living things operate. Although I work on planets, rocks and minerals, I’m finding that the interaction between minerals and animals and plants is the area that has huge numbers of unanswered questions that I don’t have the skill to address right now.
- anon answered on 16 Jun 2014:
  
  I said this briefly in the chat, but I’d really like to know a lot more about how computers work. We use them so much in our daily lives and we just rely on them to be able to do what we want. Lots of science can be made a lot easier by writing computer programmes to do the boring jobs that nobody wants to do!
- Daren Fearon answered on 16 Jun 2014:
  
  Maths and computer programming. We use a lot of complex maths to solve crystallographic problems. Fortunately, we have lots of great software that can help us without us needing to know all the maths behind it. I think having a better understanding of the maths, and how the software use it, could only be a good thing.
- Phillip Manning answered on 16 Jun 2014:
  
  My work takes me into many new disciplines, from chemistry to biology and from physics to computing…and many more! However, I have always wanted to spend more time working with live animals….if I get a chance I would love to study animals in their natural habitats around the globe. The more I understand about living beasties, the better my understanding might be of the extinct ones!
- Lynne Thomas answered on 16 Jun 2014:
  
  I’d like to understand more about how the body works. I talk to people all the time who understand how the proteins in your body work for things like the immune system but it is all a bit of a mystery to me! So if I could, I’d spend some time learning about that.
  I also do some work looking at trees and how the molecules inside trees are responsible for the strength (its called cellulose). I think I should probably know more about it than I do so I would like to understand more about how the trees make the cellulose and how trees are different to grass for example.