School Zone: Middle schoolers conduct experiments to prep for fair

By Mary Carey
Staff Writer

Published on May 02, 2008

Sometimes your data supports your hypothesis - and sometimes it does not. Ask any Amherst Regional Middle School Science Fair Club member.

On Tuesday they were putting the final touches on their projects this week before heading to the regional competition at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams on Saturday.

All seven club members came up with their own ideas and hypotheses, said Jennifer Welborn, their club advisor. "They're wonderful choices, and they all come from student interests, and that's the best part of it."

The students have been working on the projects for months.

Ian Emerson, for one, came up with a hypothesis that stood up well. He knew that krill, small shrimp-like organisms, excrete carbon near the bottom of the ocean. What he wondered was just how much they mix up nutrients in the seawater, an environmentally friendly action called biomixing, as they swim toward the surface. Emerson was looking for something to help reduce global warming, and he also likes marine biology, he said.

As krill are hard to maintain in the laboratory, he called the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which gave him about three dozen tiny shrimp, known as grass shrimp, about a half-inch long. He mixed green food coloring into one empty tank, into another tank with the grass shrimp in it and a third with the shrimp and clam juice, which the tiny creatures like to eat. As he expected, the food coloring in the tank with the shrimp dispersed much faster than in the tank without the shrimp. But the really dramatic mixing went on in the tank with clam juice. "It was 7.5 times faster than without shrimp," Emerson said. "So my data supported my hypothesis."

Sometimes, though, the data just does not support the hypothesis.

Murray Levine, who loves root beer, discovered there is controversy on the Internet over whether homemade versions of the brew have alcohol in them. "I'd say about 80 percent of people say it has .1 percent alcohol," he said. But Levine thought there is probably more, depending on the yeast used. "When there's a lot of carbon dioxide (produced), there's a lot alcohol," he explained.

So he brewed several batches of the soda, using four different kinds of yeast - champagne, brewer's and lager's. "I predicted that brewer's would produce the most alcohol," Levine said. "It is used in making beer and beer has a lot of alcohol in it." What he found, though, was that champagne yeast was the bubbliest and also yielded the root beer with the most alcohol in it, at 1.8 percent.

Passion for food led Kayla Crowe to her solar cooking project, but she ended up reflecting upon how similar solar cookers are helpful to poor people in Darfur.

"I was trying to find the best cooker that could work in Massachusetts in the winter," Crowe said about the solar cooker she made from a pattern she found online out of foil covered insulation, a can and a Plexiglas lid. It took about 45 minutes, one morning, to heat some water almost to boiling. "It doesn't take that long if it is really hot out to boil 200 milliliters of water," Crowe said. She also tried cookie dough. "After about an hour it was smushy, hot cookie dough," she said. "I ate it all myself."

For Crowe, one of the more exciting applications for a solar cooker is as a low-priced means of cooking for people in Africa who would have to spend all day looking for wood to make a fire.

Conor Power, Sourave Podder and Alvaro Rotea collaborated on their project which was inspired by something Wellborn told them about an airport where the pressure of people's footsteps caused lights to go on.

It was another case of an unsupported hypothesis. "We wanted to harvest the kinetic energy whey you're walking to charge a battery," Power said. The trio thought that an electromagnetic device in the bottom of a shoe would be more effective than a piezoelectric gadget, but it turned out it was the other way around.

Unfortunately, the piezoelectric device isn't as durable as the other, but they think they'll be able to modify it if they have some more time. "If we make it to the state competition in June, we'll have a prototype by then," Power said.

Having asthma herself, Tess Domb Sadof was curious about the effects of local air quality on people with and without asthma. So she found a dozen students with asthma and a dozen without the condition and tested their lung function with a "peak flow meter," three times a day for nine-day intervals in early February and late March. She gauged the results, taking into account the air quality for each day finding that on days there was a correlation between lung function and levels of ozone and particulates in the air.

"My conclusion is that air quality is not only an environmental issue, but a public issue as well," Domb Sadof said. For future research projects, she is thinking she might want to measure indoor air quality and also see if there is anything in the Pioneer Valley that affects the quality of the air here.

Movie screening

The public is invited to a screening of "Universal Superkinetics," an 8-minute movie directed by Amherst Regional High School alumnus Jackson Adams, on May 9 in the Middle School auditorium from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. Adams and a crew from Emerson College filmed the movie, which stars ARHS students David Eddie and Charlie Rieff and features Adams' former science teacher Phillip Crafts, as well as a musical score by ARHS alumnus Kush Mody.

Mary Carey can be reached at mary.carey@att.net.