St Mary’s students off to the Young Scientists
TWO Transition Years from St. Mary’s Diocesan School, Calum Agnew and Seb Lennon have a project in the BT Young Scientist this coming January.
Their project is an investigation into whether a person’s strength in detecting different smell strengths has a correlation with their long-term and short-term memory strength. Basically they wanted to find out that if a person has a good sense of smell, or is able to detect different smells better than others, does that mean they have a good long-term or short-term memory.
This overall idea came about as Calum remembered when his grandfather got diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and one thing that is commonly seen amongst Alzheimer’s or dementia patients is that there is a deterioration in the person’s smell strength. So Calum and Seb felt that this was another angle to try assess this correlation.
This is not Calum and Seb’s first foray into the BT Young Scientist as in January 2017, while in 2nd year they placed third in the Junior biological and ecological sciences with their project which was based on trying to determine if being weaned onto certain foods as a child could influence your development into becoming a super taster.
They basically wanted to investigate if the certain foods you ate as a child had a resulting affect on your ability to taste in the future.
Both students are excited about the opportunity to take part again in the competition and hope that all their hard work pays off. The whole St. Mary’s Diocesan community supports them, with all of first year and Transition year going to see them in action in January.