Hello! Yes, you. Hi there.

Thanks so much for voting for me to win the Extreme Speed zone of I’m A Scientist: Get Me Out Of Here. It was very nice of you to do so without making me eat a single bug (I mean, I might have done if I slept with my mouth open and one just flew in there, I dunno. Also I’m currently *being* eaten *by* bugs, so thanks, mosquitos).

You asked so many great questions (SO MANY QUESTIONS) and I learned a lot Googling for the answers. Yeah, so as a scientist you tend to specialise a lot, and it’s entirely probable that your biology knowledge is better than mine, and if you ask me what the fastest land animal is that begins with a q I’m just gonna up and Google it. Sorry. The live chats were great fun, even if there were like five back-to-back and it was 35 degrees. The q thing is probably either the Quoll or the Quokka, unsure which is faster, one is like a little stoat-rat thing and the other is a little kangaroo-rat thing, so eh, whichever of those goes fastest.

I’d also like to thank my family for supporting me through this, particularly my sister who e-mailed me repeatedly going “no, that’s wrong” with the psychology questions. I’ve encouraged her to sign up, so maybe you’ll see her next time they do one of these things.

So with the prize money I guess I’m just gonna turn it into pennies and roll around in it for a bit. Then I’m gonna take it back to the bank and they’re going to give me a dirty look while they count back all the pennies they just gave me that I’m handing back to them in little plastic bags.

So for the project thing that I’m supposed to do with the money rather than buying a ton of ice cream and just bathing in it, I thought I’d package up my research so you guys can give it a go. The first thing I’d do is have a simple model of a galaxy going, so you can see how galaxies are made, but I’d eventually like to extend it to everything from watching the entire universe evolve down to planets forming. Then you could rotate around it in 3D, find out how many stars there are of a certain age and why, learn a bit about how computer simulations work and what they can tell us about the universe, that sort of thing. I’d also love to get it working with the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, but this is entirely optional and it’s still in development so let’s see how that goes.

This is going to take a while and I haven’t figured out all the details and I’m crazy busy right now, but I’m keeping a science blog at http://whatisascience.tumblr.com/ so check back occasionally to see what I come up with.

So, yeah. Thanks for taking part, good luck with school and stuff (yes, science is hard, but eh, that’s sort of the point, no-one pays you top dollar to do something easy and easy stuff gets boring fast anyway), and hopefully you’ll get a chance to build your own universe soon enough!

A bientot,

Sam