A trio of New Hyde Park Memorial High School students took home top awards from the recent New York State Science and Engineering Fair.
Seniors Tiffany Kurian and Niroshan Shanmugarajah both placed third in the Behavioral Science category, while junior Josh Johnikutty earned a third-place award in Medicine and Health Sciences.
Kurian conducted research on the effect of over-the-counter drugs on daphia magna, a simple pond water organism. She tested the effects of diluted solutions containing aspirin, benedryl, and pseudo-ephedrine on them on the theory that the medications would increase the organism’s heart rate.
“Because they’re a versatile organism in the lab, they were easy to work with,” Kurian said.
To perform her experiments, she would dissolve half a pill of each of the drugs she tested in 15 milliliters of water, leaving the daphia magna in each solution for two or three minutes. Then she put each daphia on a slide and observe the heart action of the tiny, translucent organisms. In the end, she didn’t get a consistent result.
“My hypothesis wasn’t correct,” she recalled.
While the aspirin and ephedrine accelerated the heart rates of the daphia magna, the benedryl had the opposite effect, decreasing the heart rate.
“I assumed we had similar heart structures because the same reaction in humans took place in daphia,” Kurian said.
This fall, she will be attending the State University of New York at Binghamton to major in science.
The lab experiment was the final step in the research process.
Kurian and her fellow science researchers first spent time analyzing research papers related to their respective projects. They then wrote abstracts explaining their hypotheses and the experiments they intended to conduct to prove them. Finally, they prepared oral presentations explaining the process as part of the requirements for their entries in the state science fair.
Shanmugarajah examined the effect of dextroamphetamines on the locomotion of planarians.
He worked with 30 planarians – flatworms – dividing them into six groups and placing them in small dishes. One group acted as a control for the experiment, which entailed exposing the other groups of flatworms to varying amounts of ephedrine.
“I thought it would speed up their activities, causing them to move faster,” Shanmugarajah said.
Each day he positioned them on the dishes, marking a two centimeter line to measure their progress. But their progress seemed negligible, apart from the day before he started measuring them, after they had also been immersed in a saline solution.
“I reasoned they used up all their energy on day zero,” he said.
Next year, Shanmugarajah will continue his studies at Cornell University, majoring in biology on a pre-med track.
Johnikutty also used planaria in his experiment to measure the effect of water containing analgesics including aleve, motrin and tylenol, which contaminate drinking water supplies when they are illegally dumped in water sources by pharmaceutical companies. But his primary goal was to measure the effect of water hyacinth as a filtration agent in the water in a fourth container.
“I chose those medications because they are in the highest levels according to the Academy of Science,” he said.
He divided the planaria into three groups and exposed them to bottled water, water with pharmaceutical samples he added and tap water.
“My results showed that planaria exposed to tap water showed stunted growth,” Johnikutty said.
The porous water hyacinth plants did, indeed, augment the growth of the planaria, despite the presence of analgesics in the water.
“I liked the environmental aspect, that you could eventually help the environment,” he said.
This summer, Johnikutty will be involved in neuroscience research at Winthrop-University Hospital as part of his goal for a career in scientific research.
“That’s the hope, that they get placed outside the school,” said Angela Stone, who teaches the science research course at New Hyde Park Memorial and serves as a facilitator for the students’ science research projects.
Stone also serves as a judge at the state science fair, so she has a clear understanding of what those judging the competition expect and how the students should prepare. She said she was particularly pleased with the performance of her students at the fair this year.
“These kids are a great group of kids,” Stone said.
