Young scientists tackle some tough questions
‘Where do lonely socks go?’ and ‘Will dogs drink coloured water?’
Like most kids their age, Grade 7 students Hannah Green and Amy Dyjur spend a lot of time with their phones and iPods.
Unlike most kids their age, the two friends from Nelly McClung School wondered about how much radiation they were exposed to as a result, and set out to find an answer.
That quest brought them to the Edmonton Regional Science Fair at the NAIT main campus on Sunday, a gathering of the best science projects and the students behind them from area elementary, juniorhigh and high schools.
Armed with a Geiger counter borrowed from Dyjur’s dad, who works as an operator at the Shell Scotford plant in Fort Saskatchewan, Dyjur and Green measured nanosieverts of radiation from BlackBerrys, iPhones, LG phones and Samsung phones.
“We wanted to know how much radiation they give off, and we really wanted to use something that people use every day, that they’re exposed to,” said Dyjur. “We wanted to see if it gave off radiation for one thing, and if it would harm you.”
The girls found the BlackBerrys they tested gave off the most radiation and Samsung phones gave the least. But the individual lowest-radiation phone they tested was an iPhone.
“We found that it does harm you, but not a lot,” says Green. “It’s better to keep it in a bag or a purse, just so it’s away from your body.”
Other questions plaguing young scientific minds included, “Where do lonely socks go?” and “Will dogs drink coloured water?”
The answer to the former is to Edmonton’s waste management facility, which gathers about 30 kilograms of discarded socks and other textiles per family each year, according to one student’s project.
Tiffany Larsen, a Grade 5 student at St. Mary’s school in Edmonton, discovered her own dog, Pugsley, would not drink water coloured with dark food colouring when offered both dark and clear water.
Isaac Cairns from Dapp, asked a far more complex question — do people lie? — and found the answer in a very scientific way.
The enterprising Grade 6 student made his own lie detector, using a blood-pressure monitor, a voltmeter to measure sweat and a chest strap to measure chest displacement. His homemade apparatus detected lies correctly 66 per cent of the time, he discovered.
Aspiring scientist Rojine McVea, who says she has wanted to be a scientist “every since I knew what science was,” put her skills to work extracting bitumen from oilsands using an electrical current, rather than traditional steam or hot water methods.
In two of her three experiments, the Grade 7 student at Aurora Charter School succeeded in getting bitumen bubbling to the surface of the material. And where does a 12-year-old find oilsands? From Alberta Innovates — Technology Futures, which usually sells samples for $350. “I emailed them and told them I was a student and couldn’t afford to pay for it, so they gave it to me for free,” she explains with a smile.
She plans to work in the oilsands, or as a biologist, or as an electrical engineer like her dad, she says.
Awards were handed out Sunday afternoon in the elementary category and in the junior/senior high category.