Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

I am a highschool student, and I wanted to perform a research with phytoremediation.
I wanted to see if a certain plant could phytoremediate mercury from water, but I think finding out the mercury levels in water are way too difficult, but I want to go about doing this project, if I can. Is there an easy and affordable way to find the mercury level in water??

Dear June,

Here is a simple home test kit for mercury:
http://www.leadcheck.com/MercuryCheckSwab.shtml

You can also email [email protected] to find a doctor in your area you can refer to. Check out their website here: http://www.doctorsdata.com/water_test.asp

PRECAUTION: Mercury is highly toxic, causing damage to the nervous system at even relatively low levels of exposure. Talk to your teacher and make sure to get safety materials.

Hope this helps! Good Luck!

June,

This sounds like a very good project. Try to find a kit that can give you a quantitative measure of how much mercury there is in the water, so that you can calculate basic statistics such as mean and standard deviation in each test gropu. This would allow you to compare plants or test groups with a simple Student's t test (research this!).

Try googling with these keywords:

mercury test kit

mercury test kit "science fair"

mercury test kit quantitative "science fair"

Some kits have hazardous substances. BE VERY CAREFUL, and preferably do all of these tests under the supervision of your science teacher or other trained professional.

hey there

i found this website pdf file and it also has to do with your topic
http://www.osti.gov/em52/1999projsum/54837.pdf

im not sure if it is what you are looking for but it mentions about polution