I need a science fair project that can be testable

[deleted-903821]

How does x affect y?
I would like to test the toxicity levels of energy drinks and soda to show how bad they are to us. Any suggestions

[deleted-744967]

Hi Erik,

This is an interesting topic. What aspect of toxicity are you interested in? Do you have a specific hypothesis? Have you researched the compounds in these drinks and their effects?

If there are specific ingredients you're interested in, you may be able to buy the compounds themselves online (eg liquid caffeine). Given that you're in high school, using specific ingredients (instead of the drink itself) will make your work more rigorous, and will let your conclusions be more specific and interesting.

The big things to think about here are what effects do these compounds have on living things, and how would you measure toxicity? Then you'll need to decide on a living system to study, other than people!

So, you'll need to narrow your scope.

One option is to look at how rapidly different drinks/ingredients erode tooth enamel; this could then be linked to human health. (Rotten teeth are directly linked to infections in the heart). However this would probably need to be made into a more sophisticated project, since you're in high school.

Another option would be to use plants. You might soak a leaf (still attached to the plant) in each drink, and see if the leaf (or plant) began to show signs of toxicity - yellowing, browning, wilting, etc. You would need several plants of the same type - perhaps bean seedlings. Alternately, you could grow bean seedlings and then begin watering them with the various drinks to see if it harms them or slows their growth. This would be interesting, but will be less comparable to human health.

If you have access to bacteria, you could grow liquid cultures and then add in equivalent amounts of the different drinks to the cultures. You could then measure bacterial death (you'd need agar plates for this) or lack of growth - you'd add the drink when you start the culture, and then observe if this changes how rapidly the bacteria grow - the cloudier the culture, the better it has grown. (You would likely need a spectrophotometer for this, which your school might have). This could be linked to human health, since there are more bacteria in our bodies than there are human cells, and these bacteria are highly important to our health. If this interests you, look up 'microbiome'.

For all of these you would need to compare the energy drinks/soda to other drinks - milk, juice, etc.

Let me know if you have more questions! Other people may be by with other ideas too.