The students presenting their scientific research at the BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition in Dublin aren’t your usual secondary school students.
Instead of scrolling TikTok or Instagram, these talented students have spent their evenings researching everything from the ‘Creation of a Wormhole through Quantum Field Interactions’ all the way to finding new ways to Sustain Astronauts on Long Duration Space Missions by Cultivating Single-Celled Nutrient Sources!
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Don’t worry if you don’t understand some of these projects, their teachers didn’t seem certain either!
The BT Young Scientist Exhibition in Dublin’s RDS is where secondary schoolers turn everyday questions into mind-boggling experiments. Picture bubbling beakers and ingenious ideas packed into the main hall of the RDS, with crowds of astonished parents and non-stop mentions of Artificial Intelligence!
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With their research ‘Cultivating Single-Celled Nutrient Sources to Sustain Astronauts on Long Duration Space Missions and Engineering and Testing a Tubular Bioreactor System’ Amy O’Mahoney, 16, Berenice Cronin, 15, and Esme Leahy, 16, are putting NASA to shame!
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The teenage trio say they “noticed a gap in the market” where space agencies are sending “shelf-stable" canned food on space missions, leading to astronauts suffering from a lack of nutrition in space they said. When they learned this, instead of flicking up to Subway Surfers content, the team from St Mary’s Secondary School Mallow decided to try and solve the issue!
“We decided to investigate the possibility of using single celled proteins as a food supply.” So, the three Corkers ran down to the lab in University College Cork to build a bioreactor!
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“The astronauts could actually grow the single-cell proteins in their space shuttles,” the new Marie Curies explained that installing a tubular bioreactor in the walls of the shuttles would create a near infinite supply of food by growing the food in space! It sounds like the plot of Matt Damon’s ‘The Martian’ but these budding investors say they were merely inspired by a class discussion.
The young scientists warned the results of their research were quite bland to taste, and suggested NASA send some hot sauce up to space too!
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Kamaya Gogna is a student in St Joseph’s Secondary School and her project, ‘Fiacla: Developing a Diagnostic Tool to Aid Dental Professionals in the Identification of Oral Radiolucencies on Panoramic Dental Radiographs (OPGs)’ certainly had a few teachers doubting their biology credentials!
Aged just 15, the incredibly impressive TY student has developed a website-based diagnostic tool to analyse irregularities on dental scans!
She was inspired to research dental techniques when she was reading dentistry books her family had left around the house! When she learned that some dental diagnoses were barely better than a coin-flip, she decided to have a go herself!
“YouTube is my best friend” she said! After scouring the internet to learn dentistry terminology and teaching herself to create machine learning algorithms in Python on YouTube, Ms Gogna found herself with a better tool than the sector uses at the moment.
The algorithm was “quite simple” she joked! “It extracts features from the image... it learns what the different features are and feeds into the diagnostic tool!”
Not content with solving the woes of Irish dentistry, the teenage brainiac wants to “start off in mechanical engineering” and see where her passions take her!
Featured Image Credit: Hugh Dooley, for LADBibleTopics: Science, Ireland, Technology, Students