Question: what would be your best invention you have ever built?

Laurence O'Rourke answered on 29 Feb 2016:

I’m crap with DIY so building inventions is generally a disaster waiting to happen for me. When I was young I used to make canoes out of tree branches which turned upside down when placed in the bath – which is not nice for anyone sitting in it. But inventiveness is not only a matter of building things, it’s creating things and here I think one of my greatest inventions was to design a programme to observe using an in-space satellite called Herschel, comets and asteroids that had been or would be visited by spacecraft. The result of it was my discovery of water in the asteroid belt. Cool stuff; so remember being inventive can lead to amazing discoveries.