Calling everyone with wacky ideas for the MRI scanner!

In honour of the Biology Week competition calling for ideas of objects to put in an MRI scanner, here is a guest blog from Katy Ordidge.

Firstly, let me introduce myself… My name is Katy Ordidge and I am a second year PhD student working in UCL’s Centre for Advanced Biomedical Imaging (CABI). We are a fairly large lab, consisting of 18 PhD students, 6 post-docs, a senior research associate and our director, Mark Lythgoe (@MarkLythgoe). We are actually a bit like a large and rowdy family!

The best thing about working in CABI is the people. We try to help each other out as much as possible, for example, by teaching someone to use a piece of equipment, or even being on hand with tea and chocolate when a big experiment goes wrong. Life in a research lab can be quite hard going at times. Sometimes you have to spend weeks or even months doing the same thing before you begin to get good data!

So when we began talking to Rebecca Nesbit from the Society of Biology about doing an imaging competition for Biology Week, we got incredibly excited! It is rare opportunity for us to use the scanner in a completely different way, rather than just as a tool for our research. As the suggestions start to trickle in, everyone in our lab will be discussing the ideas and thinking about what makes a winning image.

We can’t wait to hear from you, so please get in touch! Here are some ideas below from people who have tweeted in.

PS. Objects should be less than 3cm in diameter, non-magnetic and will scan better if they have a high content of water! For example, can you guess what this is?….

To submit your idea please tweet mentioning @Society_Biology, write it on the Society of Biology Facebook wall, add a comment below this blog or email it to Rebecca Nesbit by 31st August 2012. The top five will have their object scanned and will be presented with a poster of the image during Biology Week.