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Hello! I hope whoever is reading this is doing well.
We are two students wishing to potentially complete a project together for a regional science fair (then hopefully making it to the national competition or international competition), and have come up with some ideas as to what we should do. Would it be possible for someone to tell us about the feasibility of our ideas, and how to further narrow them down and create an actual experiment out of it? We are aware of the scientific method, and experienced in research, yet have yet to complete an experimental project.
The following are our starting ideas.
Our first idea is to create a medication for migraines. We are not entirely sure about what to include in a potential therapy, yet it would be good to target a specific gene that is possibly causing migraines, along with stimulating serotonin production (which is supposedly linked to cause migraines when chronically low). We though to create a medication in the form of a puffer, or something that can be breathed in and enters the blood stream from the lungs. This would be novel, as most migraine medications are in pill form. From knowing individuals with migraines, when they have a migraine it is challenging to move, and therefore swallowing a pill could be quite a challenge and some may people are unable to take medication if further into their migraine. Breathing, on the other hand, is necessary, and occurs automatically, even if one has a bad migraine.
Our second idea is to find a way to image nerve pain. From knowing individuals who experience pain in their nerves, and require medication to silence nerves, we were interested in finding a way to stimulate nerves to work properly, as opposed to sending pain signals. We are not necessarily sure about specific literature regarding stimulation of nerves, or even nerve imaging, therefore, it would be good if anyone knows of previous experiments that specifically deal with nerve pain reduction through nerve stimulation (not silencing), as this website does not seem to provide anything similar in the project guide.
As students in high school, we hope to create an advanced experimental project, and from reading multiple guides, we know awareness of literature is absolutely necessary, so if anyone comes across previous experiments or something similar regarding either of our ideas, it would be helpful to know. Additionally, we would like to choose an experiment that we can do in either of our homes, as it may be challenging to seek mentors during the Covid-19 pandemic, so any suggestions toward how to realistically complete a project regarding either of our ideas without lab access or expensive equipment would be appreciated.
Thank you for your time. We are anticipating a reply!
A+N
Potential Project Ideas
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deleted-763721
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17eugenekim
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Re: Potential Project Ideas
Hi A+N,
Sounds like you've got great ideas - I always love to see more interest in neuroscience!
That said these do seem pretty grandiose if you are looking for realistic projects without a lab or mentor, so we'll have to think about how to scale things down. Let me try to at least direct you to relevant research points that might help.
The first thing I'm going to do is to link our Project Guide page. You might know this stuff already, you might not. In either case, it's important to be familiar with how a science project generally goes. This may guide your project development. It's also a good idea to come back to this page in later stages of your project.
https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... ience-fair
First thing that I think when we talk about drugs for the brain is the blood-brain barrier (or "BBB"). This is a major obstacle in designing any drug that's headed for the brain, and a lot has been written on it. As a super-quick summary, basically any drug that enters the body is going to use blood to get to its target. Pills are dissolved in digestion and absorbed into blood; inhalants use the lungs to get into blood; and IVs, well, go right into blood. However, the brain is super stringent about what molecules it allows from the bloodstream, and a lot of drug molecules from typical designs don't make the cut. Looking into the BBB and what people have done to pass drugs through it might give you some ideas.
It's also worth noting that nasal spray migraine drugs do exist! Which may be along the lines of the "puffer" idea you were considering. Maybe studying the difference between a nasal spray and an oral inhalant could be a potential direction of interest. Or, just looking into what these drugs are designed to do might help you frame your project.
With pain relief, electrical stimulation (e-stim) of nerves for pain has been used for the past few years. TENS units are used for both chronic and acute pain. There's actually even one model designed to prevent migraine headaches. e-stim/TENS units are commercially available, so you could feasibly make a project out of this. I think there's a lot of unanswered questions about TENS, so this might be an exciting research direction to consider.
Side note, it was hard for me to find reputable sources for how and why e-stim works for pain relief. A quick Google search returns a lot of junk sites masquerading as health news only to sell their e-stim units. I'd advise avoiding pesky dot-com shills and starting at the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcuta ... timulation) or a scholarly source (e.g. through scholar.google.com).
For something a bit different, you might want to look into transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which isn't for pain but shows promise for neurological disorders and it is super interesting. It's a more involved medical procedure than TENS, but it works off a similar principle, inducing weak electrical currents in the nervous system. Maybe looking there can give you ideas as well.
Hope some of that helps. Keep us posted and don't hesitate to ask further!
Sounds like you've got great ideas - I always love to see more interest in neuroscience!
That said these do seem pretty grandiose if you are looking for realistic projects without a lab or mentor, so we'll have to think about how to scale things down. Let me try to at least direct you to relevant research points that might help.
The first thing I'm going to do is to link our Project Guide page. You might know this stuff already, you might not. In either case, it's important to be familiar with how a science project generally goes. This may guide your project development. It's also a good idea to come back to this page in later stages of your project.
https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... ience-fair
First thing that I think when we talk about drugs for the brain is the blood-brain barrier (or "BBB"). This is a major obstacle in designing any drug that's headed for the brain, and a lot has been written on it. As a super-quick summary, basically any drug that enters the body is going to use blood to get to its target. Pills are dissolved in digestion and absorbed into blood; inhalants use the lungs to get into blood; and IVs, well, go right into blood. However, the brain is super stringent about what molecules it allows from the bloodstream, and a lot of drug molecules from typical designs don't make the cut. Looking into the BBB and what people have done to pass drugs through it might give you some ideas.
It's also worth noting that nasal spray migraine drugs do exist! Which may be along the lines of the "puffer" idea you were considering. Maybe studying the difference between a nasal spray and an oral inhalant could be a potential direction of interest. Or, just looking into what these drugs are designed to do might help you frame your project.
With pain relief, electrical stimulation (e-stim) of nerves for pain has been used for the past few years. TENS units are used for both chronic and acute pain. There's actually even one model designed to prevent migraine headaches. e-stim/TENS units are commercially available, so you could feasibly make a project out of this. I think there's a lot of unanswered questions about TENS, so this might be an exciting research direction to consider.
Side note, it was hard for me to find reputable sources for how and why e-stim works for pain relief. A quick Google search returns a lot of junk sites masquerading as health news only to sell their e-stim units. I'd advise avoiding pesky dot-com shills and starting at the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcuta ... timulation) or a scholarly source (e.g. through scholar.google.com).
For something a bit different, you might want to look into transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which isn't for pain but shows promise for neurological disorders and it is super interesting. It's a more involved medical procedure than TENS, but it works off a similar principle, inducing weak electrical currents in the nervous system. Maybe looking there can give you ideas as well.
Hope some of that helps. Keep us posted and don't hesitate to ask further!
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deleted-763721
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Re: Potential Project Ideas
Thank you for your ideas. We are still thinking about what to do going forward, and will return to this topic with any inquiries.
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deleted-763721
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Re: Potential Project Ideas
Hello again. After some thinking, we have come up with a potential idea, and are hoping you can lead us to further develop the idea into a feasible and meaningful project.
Out of all the suggestions, we were most intrigued by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Our idea was to potentially create an online simulation for the technology, although we have never coded. Regardless, we would like to study the Biot-Savart Law, which seems like confusing calculus and we do not quite understand it, as well as the Maxwell-Faraday equation. As TMS takes both into consideration, we do not understand how either law works and are wondering if we can change the value of certain variables to maximize electromagnetism with less energy. Additionally, we would be interested in altering TMS to be more compact, and potentially more efficient, as well as less expensive. Based on our idea, we have some questions below.
(1) Do you have any further resources which we can use to understand specifically how the Biot-Savart Law and Maxwell-Faraday equation relate to TMS?
(2) What resources do you recommend to learn the Biot-Savart Law and Maxwell-Faraday equation and what each variable/value refers to? (We have limited math experience, as A is going into grade 10 and will be just starting pre-calculus, and N is entering grade 11 pre-calculus. N has only done physics at the grade 10 science level.)
(3) How can we manipulate certain values of the law and equation to increase efficiency with less energy supplied?
(4) Do you think it is possible to display both the law and equation mentioned above in code, or as a simulation that changes when values are altered?
(5) Is it possible to make a digital model of TMS and then alter it, changing certain aspects (such as butterfly coil size or diameter) to allow the technology to be more compact or usable in smaller spaces, more efficient, and less expensive?
(6) How can we tell whether research (or an experiment) conducted will be actually meaningful?
(7) Have we strayed too far from neuroscience?
(8) If completed with your guidance and guidance from others, can our project make it to advanced science fairs (like CWSF)?
We have never coded, so we are concerned this project may be too challenging to complete, yet how can we tone it down, if necessary? Do you recommend any resources to learn how to code?
Thank you for all your previous suggestions. We hope this topic does not stray too far from life sciences, yet are concerned this has become an engineering project, or too much based on computer sciences or physical sciences. Anyways, we are anticipating a reply, and are grateful for your time spent answering our inquiries.
A+N
Out of all the suggestions, we were most intrigued by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Our idea was to potentially create an online simulation for the technology, although we have never coded. Regardless, we would like to study the Biot-Savart Law, which seems like confusing calculus and we do not quite understand it, as well as the Maxwell-Faraday equation. As TMS takes both into consideration, we do not understand how either law works and are wondering if we can change the value of certain variables to maximize electromagnetism with less energy. Additionally, we would be interested in altering TMS to be more compact, and potentially more efficient, as well as less expensive. Based on our idea, we have some questions below.
(1) Do you have any further resources which we can use to understand specifically how the Biot-Savart Law and Maxwell-Faraday equation relate to TMS?
(2) What resources do you recommend to learn the Biot-Savart Law and Maxwell-Faraday equation and what each variable/value refers to? (We have limited math experience, as A is going into grade 10 and will be just starting pre-calculus, and N is entering grade 11 pre-calculus. N has only done physics at the grade 10 science level.)
(3) How can we manipulate certain values of the law and equation to increase efficiency with less energy supplied?
(4) Do you think it is possible to display both the law and equation mentioned above in code, or as a simulation that changes when values are altered?
(5) Is it possible to make a digital model of TMS and then alter it, changing certain aspects (such as butterfly coil size or diameter) to allow the technology to be more compact or usable in smaller spaces, more efficient, and less expensive?
(6) How can we tell whether research (or an experiment) conducted will be actually meaningful?
(7) Have we strayed too far from neuroscience?
(8) If completed with your guidance and guidance from others, can our project make it to advanced science fairs (like CWSF)?
We have never coded, so we are concerned this project may be too challenging to complete, yet how can we tone it down, if necessary? Do you recommend any resources to learn how to code?
Thank you for all your previous suggestions. We hope this topic does not stray too far from life sciences, yet are concerned this has become an engineering project, or too much based on computer sciences or physical sciences. Anyways, we are anticipating a reply, and are grateful for your time spent answering our inquiries.
A+N
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17eugenekim
- Former Expert
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Re: Potential Project Ideas
I'm going to real quick skip to question (6) first: "How can we tell whether research (or an experiment) conducted will be actually meaningful?"
Any research project or experiment that you do, as long as it is done correctly, will be meaningful to some degree. What most people consider "meaningful" comes from how you connect the project to a broader issue, whether that's health, environment, engineering, etc. Basically, if the project is related in any way (and it will be) to a question that someone else is interested in, it is a meaningful project. Part of it will be how good of a "salesman" you are; how will you get your audience to care about your research, whether you found something interesting or not? You already practiced this "selling" in your first post, when you explained the rationale behind your two initial ideas. If you can do this with whatever research question you end up studying, you have a meaningful project.
At the high school level, especially without a formal lab, no one is expecting you to discover something groundbreaking and novel. It's awesome if you do, obviously, but it doesn't have to be your end goal. So just because someone has done a similar project in a fancy lab and published a paper on it, doesn't mean you can't say "what if we tweaked this a bit?" and develop your own research direction. Some great research is done this way. I am not familiar with CWSF, but as long as you're asking the right questions (and you have been so far!), you should be on track for a quality project.
A computational model of TMS would certainly be interesting. The physics and math behind electromagnetic induction itself, disregarding implementation into a computer program, is complicated but might be possible to scale down. (I think Maxwell-Faraday is taught to some degree in AP Physics.) I am not confident in my physics ability, but I would suggest the Physical Sciences subforum, or frankly a physics teacher at your school may be able to help break it down in a way that's not too convoluted or too oversimplified.
For a very rough attempt at explaining the two laws (and be forewarned, there's probably more than these two):
Biot-Savart describes the relationship between an electric current (i.e. inside the TMS coil) and the induced magnetic field at some distance & direction away from the current. Pulsing (constantly changing) the current in the coil causes the induced magnetic field to change. That pulsing magnetic field induces its own electric field in the brain, which is described by the aforementioned Maxwell-Faraday equation.
I worry that the coding itself may be difficult without prior programming experience. What you're describing is definitely possible. But I have little computer knowledge myself, so I don't personally know what goes into building a simulation. I do see a few papers (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 1X19304097 , https://ieeexplore-ieee-org.proxy.libra ... er=5626096) that have attempted a simulation of TMS + brain tissue, so maybe that could guide you, but they are highly technical. For a scaled-down simulation to start with, I'd suggest disregarding the brain element (organic tissue is much harder to model correctly) and focusing on the electromagnetism around the coil device itself.
Finally, your concerns are valid. "Straying" from neuroscience is subjective (neurology will still be the center of your "sales pitch" in this project), but I can say that we're reaching the point where my neuroscience background can't help you much further. Experts in Physical Sciences or Math & Computer Sciences may be better suited to help if you plan to pursue this line of thinking.
If you are dead-set on a more firmly neuroscience-oriented project, we can circle back around and think on it some more.
Any research project or experiment that you do, as long as it is done correctly, will be meaningful to some degree. What most people consider "meaningful" comes from how you connect the project to a broader issue, whether that's health, environment, engineering, etc. Basically, if the project is related in any way (and it will be) to a question that someone else is interested in, it is a meaningful project. Part of it will be how good of a "salesman" you are; how will you get your audience to care about your research, whether you found something interesting or not? You already practiced this "selling" in your first post, when you explained the rationale behind your two initial ideas. If you can do this with whatever research question you end up studying, you have a meaningful project.
At the high school level, especially without a formal lab, no one is expecting you to discover something groundbreaking and novel. It's awesome if you do, obviously, but it doesn't have to be your end goal. So just because someone has done a similar project in a fancy lab and published a paper on it, doesn't mean you can't say "what if we tweaked this a bit?" and develop your own research direction. Some great research is done this way. I am not familiar with CWSF, but as long as you're asking the right questions (and you have been so far!), you should be on track for a quality project.
A computational model of TMS would certainly be interesting. The physics and math behind electromagnetic induction itself, disregarding implementation into a computer program, is complicated but might be possible to scale down. (I think Maxwell-Faraday is taught to some degree in AP Physics.) I am not confident in my physics ability, but I would suggest the Physical Sciences subforum, or frankly a physics teacher at your school may be able to help break it down in a way that's not too convoluted or too oversimplified.
For a very rough attempt at explaining the two laws (and be forewarned, there's probably more than these two):
Biot-Savart describes the relationship between an electric current (i.e. inside the TMS coil) and the induced magnetic field at some distance & direction away from the current. Pulsing (constantly changing) the current in the coil causes the induced magnetic field to change. That pulsing magnetic field induces its own electric field in the brain, which is described by the aforementioned Maxwell-Faraday equation.
I worry that the coding itself may be difficult without prior programming experience. What you're describing is definitely possible. But I have little computer knowledge myself, so I don't personally know what goes into building a simulation. I do see a few papers (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 1X19304097 , https://ieeexplore-ieee-org.proxy.libra ... er=5626096) that have attempted a simulation of TMS + brain tissue, so maybe that could guide you, but they are highly technical. For a scaled-down simulation to start with, I'd suggest disregarding the brain element (organic tissue is much harder to model correctly) and focusing on the electromagnetism around the coil device itself.
Finally, your concerns are valid. "Straying" from neuroscience is subjective (neurology will still be the center of your "sales pitch" in this project), but I can say that we're reaching the point where my neuroscience background can't help you much further. Experts in Physical Sciences or Math & Computer Sciences may be better suited to help if you plan to pursue this line of thinking.
If you are dead-set on a more firmly neuroscience-oriented project, we can circle back around and think on it some more.
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deleted-763721
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Re: Potential Project Ideas
Hello again! Thank you for your reply!
We see you are correct, in that our project will be meaningful as long as we have a rationale for it.
Both of us are interested in completing a project based on TMS, yet, as mentioned, we have never done any computer programming. We will provide a quick message in the computer sciences forum, simply referring individuals to this topic and asking about what programs can be used in the creation of a simulation. Maybe some experts there can guide us on that idea.
Nonetheless, we are interested in neuroscience, and willing to return to something that does not involve computers as much. We will take some more time to think, but, in the meantime, will refer to the computing science forum to seek computing science resources.
Regarding the topic of neuroscience itself, we will continue reading up on literature, and will hopefully get back to you in a few days (or more quickly).
Thank you for your time!
A+N
We see you are correct, in that our project will be meaningful as long as we have a rationale for it.
Both of us are interested in completing a project based on TMS, yet, as mentioned, we have never done any computer programming. We will provide a quick message in the computer sciences forum, simply referring individuals to this topic and asking about what programs can be used in the creation of a simulation. Maybe some experts there can guide us on that idea.
Nonetheless, we are interested in neuroscience, and willing to return to something that does not involve computers as much. We will take some more time to think, but, in the meantime, will refer to the computing science forum to seek computing science resources.
Regarding the topic of neuroscience itself, we will continue reading up on literature, and will hopefully get back to you in a few days (or more quickly).
Thank you for your time!
A+N
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deleted-763721
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Re: Potential Project Ideas
We have posted a brief inquiry in the Math and Computer Science forum (you can find it here: viewtopic.php?f=30&t=21600), along with leading individuals from that forum to this posting. Please note that we are still intrigued by neuroscience, and are not sure which direction we wish for our project to do. We will continue to look at literature, gain more knowledge, and possibly come up with other ideas that do not require computer science skills, which we do not have.