EpiPens don’t work in space? NASA didn’t know — but Canadian students did | 24CA News
A gaggle of gifted Canadian elementary faculty college students has made a discovery that’s out of this world — EpiPens don’t work in house.
“It was pretty cool,” stated scholar Hannah Thomson. “NASA didn’t know.”
Hannah is one in every of a number of college students in grades 4 to 6 at St. Brother Andre Elementary School in Ottawa who’re a part of a NASA initiative known as “Cubes in Space.”
The program helps kids and youngsters around the globe launch experiments aboard NASA rockets.
For their experiment, the scholars between the ages of 9 and 11 targeted on the EpiPen, a typical medical device present in school rooms throughout the nation. The injection system is used to reverse the consequences of life-threatening allergic reactions.
The youngsters had a cosmic query: would an EpiPen nonetheless work in house?
“I thought it was brilliant,” stated University of Ottawa chemist Paul Mayer, who helped analyze the group’s findings.
“The first part of doing science is asking the right questions and they asked a fantastic question.”
Read extra:
Reality examine: Is it secure to make use of an expired EpiPen within the occasion of anaphylaxis?
The college students took samples of epinephrine, the energetic ingredient in EpiPens, and put them in tiny cubes, which have been despatched on board a NASA rocket and balloon.
Once the cubes returned to Earth, their contents have been dropped at a lab on the University of Ottawa.
There, Mayer and his workforce made a outstanding discovery: the epinephrine now not labored, gorgeous the profession chemists.
“There is an interaction with the cosmic radiation that comes when you leave the atmosphere,” he defined.
In truth, a part of the pattern turned poisonous in house.
“The epinephrine came back only 87 per cent epinephrine,” defined scholar Isaiah Falconer. “The other 13 per cent was converted into benzoic acid, which at that quantity was highly poisonous.”
The findings proved the youngsters’s speculation and are spurring new questions on potential dangers for astronauts with extreme allergic reactions. “To find out (that) scientists who have been working for years and years on this and then us elementary school kids discover it, it’s really cool,” stated scholar Antonio Lucifero.
Their instructor Deborah Quail-Blier couldn’t imagine the outcomes.
“We were all shocked and excited,” she stated. “My students are very forward-thinking. They’re already anticipating people going to the moon and then beyond and colonizing Mars.”
Her class is now making ready to journey to Virginia in June to share their findings with NASA.
They’re additionally anticipating future careers in science. Benjamin Sum desires to construct rockets when he grows up and is leaning on his expertise on this NASA experiment.
“You feel like you’re making a real change,” stated Sum. “A lot of the time it feels like it’s just adults. But kids can actually be involved.”
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