Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hey everybody!
Well it's that time again at my school for science fair. Every year the hardest part is getting my project approved. I was looking through some sites and I found a project that sounded pretty cool to me. It's about the "5 second rule"-- where if you drop a piece of food on the ground and pick it up in less than 5 seconds it's safe to eat. You would do the tests for 5, 30 and 60 seconds on dry and wet food. I thought this idea sounded kinda good. I was wondering if anyone thought this would be an appropriate project for high school. I also didnt really understand how to grow the cultures. If anyone has ideas on how to make it more advanced or on how to grow the cultures, I would GREATLY appreciate it.

Thanks SOOOOOO much.

This is a fun (and fairly easy) one. My daughter (age 10) did this last year using culture dishes from Carolina Medical Supplies. I think it was EMB agar to show the presence of enteric bacteria (kind that makes you sick). She dropped a variety of food(wwet, dry, hot, cold) in different places. ( Did section on Graham's stain as well. I may be off on the spelling/ names as she is the science wiz.

Hope this helps!

Yep, that's pretty much the gist of it. Here is one example that you could look at (this one is from a middle school level project that made it to the CA State Science Fair last year: http://www.usc.edu/CSSF/History/2004/Projects/J1302.pdf

One seldom sees, however, this project being adopted at the high school level. You could certainly EXPAND the experiment but it would be difficult to raise its level of sophistication.

Shijun

One way to expand the idea is to test (after doing the five second part) is to try to use different antibiotics (you can get them from scientific supply companies-ask your teacher) to kill the germs and bacteria.