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Tallulah Dogwill

RESEARCH TEAM. As a new year of ASR began, projects took off at full speed while students researched, planned, and configured their project ideas into reality.

According to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, heart disease, shortness of breath, chest pain, vomiting and addiction are all effects of vaping. Every year, new research is published linking vape chemicals to health issues. Despite this fact, few studies have been published investigating the impacts of vaping on bone health. In the past month, junior Charlotte Talbot decided to take her own swing at this pressing topic, using her advanced science research project as a vessel.

“I’m mixing the flavoring chemicals that are in the e-cigarettes called acetoin with nicotine, then I’m putting that into lime water, which makes a calcium-like sediment when carbon dioxide is added to it. The calcium is there to mimic a bone,” Talbot said.

In the fall of 2024, Talbot wasn’t the only one beginning a complex project. As a new year of ASR began, projects took off at full speed while students researched, planned, and configured their project ideas into reality.

For ASR students, inspiration came from numerous places. Talbot chose to investigate vapes because she has always been interested in the medical field and believes that vape issues resonate with people her age. On the other hand, a personal experience inspired junior Evan Morris’s neuroscience and optogenetics project.

When Morris was younger, his sister had Achondroplasia, a condition causing abnormal or stunted growth in parts of the body. While living with Achondroplasia, his sister required a spinal decompression surgery. From this day on, Morris has been continually intrigued by neurosurgery.

“We were at the hospital, and the neurosurgeon was giving us his briefing for what he was going to be doing. I found it really inspiring and cool, the kind of impact that he could have on my life and my sister’s life,” he said.

ASR instructor Karissa Baker said, “Right now, the crunch time is [when] you’re in the lab. You’ve proposed your idea, [and] we’ve ordered or collected the supplies that you need. Now you’re actually starting to do your procedure, and some trials.”

Once students completed their research, they planned and started the first steps of their projects. This process looked different for each student. For Talbot, since her Acetoin, the flavoring chemical in vapes, hasn’t shipped yet, she ran tests on other individual variables. For Morris, this involved developing a method for growing E. coli and C. elegans cultures that would later be used for data analysis relating to neuronal plasticity.

After months of hands-on work, ASR students are required to write a research paper and then enter their completed projects into two competitions. Students’ inventions, creations, or models are then judged at the Junior Science and Humanity Symposium and the Twin Cities Regional Science Fair, which takes place in the spring.

Looking ahead, Talbot believes the most challenging part of her project will be obtaining the desired results in a format on which she can write her paper. Uncertainty is a part of ASR projects, and for students, this means constantly adjusting their experiments to fit their goals.

Talbot believes that if her findings are significant enough, she will try to publish them in a scientific journal.