A meander around the BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition at the RDS in Dublin can sometimes bring a new perspective on everyday things.
Take tea-towels. They look harmless enough, but Oisín McWeeney (17), Enda Downes (17) and Liam Hendrick (17) from Maynooth Post Primary School discovered that these ordinary household objects can support an astonishing load of bacteria under certain conditions.
"We decided to look at this because every household has a tea-towel," says Oisín, who explains they got the original idea from a biology experiment in school that examined bacteria on everyday objects.
The fifth-year students soaked identical, new tea-towels in meat juice, melon juice, milk or water for 24 hours to encourage bacteria to grow.
"They smelled really bad," says Liam, pointing to images of mottled tea-towels in their exhibit.
The students swabbed the soaked tea-towels and grew samples on agar plates for two days, then counted the resulting bacterial colonies.
They found that soaking the towels in melon juice supported the greatest levels of bacterial growth, while steeping them in plain water yielded hardly any.
Enda says they found the results surprising: "We would have expected the meat juice to be the worst," he says.
The group also found that tea-towel storage can affect the amounts of bacteria that grow.
In particular, they saw that bugs like to lurk in crumpled cloths that trap oxygen in the folds.
"We would recommend that people wash tea-towels often and hang them on a rack," says
Oisín.
On a more sombre note, Cora Commane (16) and Patricia Cusack (16) from Mary Immaculate Secondary School in Co Clare looked at burial patterns in their locality.
They mapped seven graveyards in north Clare, and found that 90 per cent of people buried there were locals, with the remainder coming mostly from the US, says Patricia.
The transition-year students also carried out a questionnaire-based survey that indicated the majority of people in the area would like to be buried locally.
The results suggest more land should be purchased for graveyards, says Cora.
