On the 11th of January Siobhán Nestor, Sinéad O’Brien and Dearbháil Mac Mahon travelled to Dublin to compete in the BT Young Scientist 2012. They had been working on the project since September along with their teacher Mrs. Sheridan.

“Our project was titled an investigation into the effectiveness of natural versus a synthetic anti-perspirant. The aim of our project was to compare the most popular synthetic anti-perspirant, Sure, in our school with a leading natural anti-perspirant called Perspi-Gel. We compared them by applying both anti-perspirants on the underarm and then placing cotton pads under each arm and weighing the sweat produced after 10 minutes of exercise. The difference in the weight of the cotton pad after the exercise was carried out was the amount of sweat produced. The less sweat produced, the more effective the anti-perspirant. We carried this experiment out on 35 students and from our results we found that Perspi-Gel was 38% more effective than Sure. We researched the ingredients of both anti-perspirants and found that 50% of the ingredients in Sure were potentially harmful to the skin, these ranged from skin irritants to potentially carcogenic ingredients while only 20% of the ingredients in Perspi-Gel were irritants.”

They arrived early Wednesday morning to set up their display in the RDS and later on attended the opening ceremony which was broadcasted live on television. Over the next few days their project was on display to the public and judged by Professors. “The public were interested in our project because of the topical link between ingredients present in everyday products with breast cancer. We got good feedback from the judges and they encouraged us to continue working on our project and publish it in our local libraries and online. We are currently working on our project for other science events like SciFest. We really enjoyed the experience and the buzz around the event. Everyone was friendly and we met lots of new friends, we got to meet celebrities like Ryan Tubridy and there were lots of organised events in the evenings. We would really recommend others to participate in the young scientist as it’s a great experience. We would like to thank Mrs. Sheridan for her help throughout the project and our volunteers who participated in the experiment.”

All their hard work paid off when they got awarded with a highly recommended rosette. This was a great achievement as this year’s Young Scientist received the greatest amount of entries yet.