It turns out that antacids are good for more than just relieving heartburn. They can make your plants grow.
Keaton Miller, a Grade 10 student at Olds High School, discovered that watering plants with a solution containing antacids will act as a fertilizer.
ìIt was really good. Really good indoor fertilizer,î Miller said. ìSince you can't use fertilizer indoors ñ it's bad for the environment ñ it's a perfectly good thing to use in houseplants.î
That was one of the findings of his science project titled, ìThe Effects of Human Medication on Plants,î entered in the Mountainview Science and Technology Society Science Fair, held on March 1.
More than 150 students took part and Miller placed in the top-three among entrants from grades 10 to 12. Two other groups joined him: Madison Fleming and Cali Wright in second place, and Janine Nel and Taylor Ormann in first. Winners walked away with small cash prizes, trophies and recognition.
Miller, 15, said he chose his project because he heard that a lot of medication is thrown out, flushed down the toilet and getting into the water system, damaging plant life. So he wanted to see the effects on plants.
He tested two painkillers, two sleeping pills and two antacids after consulting with a pharmacist on what were the most oversold drugs.
Olds College provided him with small white flowering plants that would give him results the quickest.
Miller applied the medication both as a powder and a solution. One plant took medication as a powder and another as a liquid.
He watered the plants daily, measured his plants and recorded his findings.
What he discovered was that painkillers caused discolouration.
ìTylenol almost killed off both plants, causing a lot of discolouration, a lot of wilting, height decrease,î Miller said.
Sleeping pills also caused discolouration, he said.
ìIt was really white, kind of leathery, hard to rip apart after,î Miller said, adding that sleeping pills also caused height decrease and wilting.
However, the plants that took the antacids ended up taller, greener and more turgid, he said.
Miller said he researched an explanation and found that antacids contain calcium and aluminum, two things plants need. The calcium also removed toxins from the plant, he continued.
Miller, who wants to become a humanitarian in the future, said that in the past, people once brought their medication back to pharmacies for proper disposal. That doesn't happen anymore.
ìYou had to take it back to the pharmacy and they dispose of it with acids or something. And then people just stopped kind of doing that,î he said. ìThere used to be a fine if you didn't but people just stopped enforcing that. So anybody that has overdue medication just throws it out.î
ìBacteria in Iceî
Fleming and Wright, two Grade 10 students, said they first wanted to test for bacteria in the school's drinking water. But since the water supply is chlorinated, they were unlikely to find any.
Fleming said somebody told them to try testing ice in hotels and restaurants. She once heard an anecdote that ice from a popular fast-food chain had more bacteria than toilet water, she continued.
The pair gathered samples from one hotel and four restaurants. They didn't feel comfortable disclosing the sources because they never told them that the ice was being used for their project, Wright said.
To test for bacteria, they used a filtration system at Olds College. They melted the ice samples in a beaker, used a vacuum to pull the water through a filter that collected the bacteria, dyed the samples blue and let them incubate for 48 hours.
Pink, blue and brown specks appeared, representing different types of bacteria. They're still trying to find out what kinds of bacteria they collected, Fleming said.
They also grew bacteria from the samples on Petri dishes. The trypticase soy agar (TSA) plate tested for common bacteria. The salmonella shigella agar (SSA) plate tested for pathogenic bacteria.
According to Fleming, the most common bacteria grew on sample D, with 376 colonies from a one-millilitre sample. By comparison, samples A and B only had about 20 on the TSA plates.
Fleming attributed this to the openness of self-serve ice dispensers.
ìThe ones that help yourself, many people just come by and you're coughing and sneezing and doing all the normal human stuff around them, right? And touching it,î she said.
Sample C grew the most colonies on the SSA plates, she continued.
However, in all cases, there was little chance of somebody falling ill, Wright said.
ìTesting Antimicrobial Properties of Salivaî
An old superstition said that having a dog lick a wound would speed up healing. Grade 10 students Nel and Ormann drew inspiration from it for their experiment.
ìWhile we were searching this up, the anti-microbial properties within the saliva, we were wondering if you could somehow just harness the positive effects of that and duplicate that so you could have an inexpensive source of medicine for a Third-World country,î Nel said.
The two students, who both want to become doctors, tested saliva for anti-microbial properties and if it could form a barricade around a wound.
They grew bacteria on TSA plates and had sterile dots, punched out on filter paper, placed onto the plate. Saliva samples were dropped onto each dot.
Nel said they were looking for a ìzone of inhibition,î a bacteria-free ring around the dot.
If the saliva had anti-microbial properties, the effects would expand, killing bacteria up to a certain range, Ormann continued.
That never happened.
ìSo throughout our experimentation, we learned that our animal saliva did not have anti-bacterial properties towards the strains that we used,î Ormann said. ìWe used E. coli, the bacteria from the bottom of the foot, bacteria from a floor tile.î
To test for a barricading effect around a wound, the group used gram stains, a university-level experiment.
According to Ormann, a gram stain determines if a sample is positive or negative. A negative test will be bright pink and a positive one will be purple. If the bacteria were coloured purple and the saliva pink, a barricading effect would have occurred if the sample stays pink.
She said that the procedure starts by baking bacteria onto a microscope slide. Four chemicals are added: safranin, iodine, decolourizer and crystal violet. Then the slide is put under a microscope to determine the colour.
Ormann said their results were inconclusive but pointed to new leads.
"Everything that we used within our experiment was a gram-negative, which meant it was all pink so we couldn't see the desired effect we wanted,î she said. ìBut we still gained the knowledge that everything was negative and in the future, we want to use the staph strain, which is for sure a dark purple."
