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Trip to 100-yen store nets Gifu teens scientific accolades

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GIFU–What’s the most interesting thing you can do with a pocket full of change and a trip to a 100-yen (90 cents) store?

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Two Gifu high schoolers say they can soon use that kind of bargain-basement shopping spree to do things such as detect substances in industrial waste liquid and radioactive water from a nuclear power plant.

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The thrifty teens are gaining global attention for developing a unique, low-cost way to analyze the content of liquids by using 100-yen store materials. Their method makes use of a super absorbent polymer commonly found in diapers and other consumer products, and affordable tea bags.

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Kazuma Sakakibara and Yoshiaki Shirai, both 17, are students at the Gifu prefecture-run Gifu High School. Both are members of a chemistry team that’s part of the school’s natural science club.

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“We’re a prefectural high school club, so we don’t have much money to spend on our research,” Sakakibara said.

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Their research was praised at a national chemical research contest held in October, the 2019 Grand Contest on Chemistry for High School Students.

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After that, they received an invitation to the International Science Youth Forum 2020, which brings together young scientific researchers from around the world. At a January meeting of the forum in Singapore, they made a presentation of their research in English.

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The pair figured out that the amount of water the diaper polymer absorbs changes based on the contents of a given liquid solution.

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Their research focuses specifically on the ions–electrically charged atoms–that are in the solution. Ions that are charged with positive electricity are called cations, such as lithium ions and strontium ions, and those charged with negative electricity are called anions.

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The students found through their experiments that the mass of the liquid solution that the polymer absorbs changes according to the type of cations that are in the solution.

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The research was inspired by other experiments they did using a type of absorbent toy they bought at a 100-yen shop. The toy swelled up in size after being dipped into water. They also dipped it in various liquid solutions and found that its size remained almost unchanged in some of the solutions while it grew 10 times in size in a certain liquid solution.

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Shirai, who fell in love with chemistry when he was captivated by the beauty of the periodic table when he laid eyes on it when he was a junior high student, said watching the toy growing in different sizes piqued his curiosity.

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“I wanted to know why there’s such a huge difference in how much the toy swells,” he said.

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Commercial research on the topic is mostly focused on studying what makes the polymer so good at absorbing water, since that’s related to selling better diapers. But Shirai said little research has been done in cases where the polymer is less absorbent.

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To accurately measure absorption, unwanted liquids need to be removed after the polymer is dipped into the solution. The students said they used tea bags sold at a 100-yen shop for that.

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“We looked for a high-performance material sold at an affordable price and found a package of 40 tea bags that costs 100 yen,” Sakakibara said.

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The two young researchers put a powdered polymer into each tea bag, dipped it into an aqueous solution, then measured the weight by hanging the bag in an instrument.

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They recorded how much the weight of bags containing 1 gram of the polymer changed after dipping them into a 300-milliliter liquid solution and then leaving them in the solution for an hour. They found one bag weighed 67 grams after being dipped into a solution containing lithium ion, while another weighed 9 grams after being put into a magnesium ion solution.

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They did the same for solutions containing other cations and used the obtained data to make a graph. They managed to establish a method for identifying which cation is contained in a certain solution, whose components are unknown, by measuring the weight of a bag after dipping it into the solution and comparing the data with those on the graph.

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The students are now trying to figure out how to detect which cations are in a given liquid solution, even if it contains multiple cations.

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“By further developing this method, we’ll be able to identify the component of industrial liquid waste and radioactive water from a nuclear power plant without using large equipment,” said Sakakibara.

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“That will lead to reducing the cost and the number of test samples needed to detect the component and contribute to preserving the aquatic environment. We want to continue our research by sticking to our low-cost policy.”

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