Firstly I’d like to say a massive thank you to everyone that voted for me as the Human Limits Zone winner. I would also like to thank the other scientists who also spent a lot of time and effort answering the questions and doing the chats. Thanks also goes to The Physiological Society for supporting the Human Limits Zone. The Physiological Society have a great website which links to lots of interesting information sources on how the body works in all kinds of population groups and all kind of environments.

The questions some of you guys came up with was quite outstanding. Sometimes I found myself sitting at my computer during a chat thinking, why didn’t I ever think to ask that? Often the chats got a little crazy and I did find myself wallowing in pile of questions that I just could not get through, so apologies to the ones a did miss out on.

There was  a lot of you out there that wanted to know how hot, cold, long without water or long without oxygen we could live for or what others have managed in the past. Sadly we often can’t test these questions in the lab as we don’t want to kill anyone, but we do know a lot from human survival stories. However, we can test human responses to extreme environments in the labs or in the field.

Many of you asked how I got into science, which I explained was through playing lots of sport and trying to understand how we work, train and adapt. I therefore came to enjoy human biology and wanted to explore it more at university and then as a researcher/lecturer. I also informed many of you that it’s not necessarily about liking science but having something you are really interested in and then linking it to science and the understanding of it.

With help from the undergraduates, I will start to put together the films I explained to you, using the money from the competition. I will then put these onto various formats and get the imascientist crew to make sure they are sent out to as many of you as possible. These may take a little time while the undergraduate students are on holidays, but I want to make them as relevant and interesting to you all as possible.

I hope taking part in this project has got you excited by science or at least thinking about how science relates to everything around us.

Have a great summer holiday!

Alan