After 4 yrs,city students’ projects enter national science and tech fair

This year’s IRIS awards were bagged by a student from Rajkot and two from Kolkata,and minor planets were named after them. This year among the junior category,Jayakrishnan V from Kendriya Vidyalaya and Deepti from St Helena’s School have reached the national round. Sarthak Chandra,a Class XII student from Vikhe-Patil School has made it to the senior category.

While Jayakrishnan and Deepti were guided by scientists at the National Chemical Laboratory (NCL) in Pune,as a part of Exciting Science Group work carried out at NCL for the last two years. Sarthak has done his work at Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education in Mumbai.

Talking about his project,Jayakrishnan said,“I attached chlorophyll pigments to carbon nano tubes,which are allotropes of carbon to observe the carbon dioxide absorption of plants. The rate of the absorption was increased substantially. If this phenomena is tapped upon,then it can produce remarkable results in controlling global warming. I verified the results by studying the change in weight of the plant which increased in a particular instance form 50 mg to 57 mg.”

Sarthak studied the change in volumes of solutions after solutes are dissolved in them. His work has proved the common misconception wrong that the volume of the resulting solution remains the same and only mass increases even after solutes are dissolved. At a felicitation programme organised for them at NCL on Tuesday,Guruswamy Kumaraswamy,co-ordinator,Exciting Science Group said,“We stared the mentoring programme for the students in February. We helped them refine their ideas and provided with the infrastructure for the experiments,their innovation and persistent efforts helped them.”