A STUDY of the preservation of corpses in bogs has won this year's Aer Lingus Young Scientist of the Year Award.
The project, the work of Emma McQuillan, Ciara McGoldrick and Fiona Fraser, of the Dominican College, Fortwilliam Park, Belfast, was described by the judges as "a superb project, carried out with great skill and beautifully presented".
The three 17-year-olds buried piglets, which have a similar biochemistry to humans, at varying depths in two bogs in an attempt to find out the reasons why cadavers are preserved so well in bog conditions.
They discovered that to the three known reasons for preservation - anaerobic, acidic and antiseptic qualities - a fourth should be added: time. The time elapsing between death and burial in the bog is crucial to the process of preservation.
"Their findings shed new light on the factors responsible for body preservation in bogs and are of value not only to archaeologists but to forensic scientists and pathologists", said the chairman of the judging committee, Mr Seamus Kearney.
The three students were presented with the Aer Lingus silver trophy and £1,000 by the Taoiseach, Mr Bruton, who praised all the exhibition entrants for "making us confident in our future". More than 250 projects from 530 second-level students were entered in the competition.
Emma, Ciara and Fiona will represent Ireland in the European Union Science Contest in Milan, Italy, where they will compete against the cream of projects submitted by more than 10,000 students from around Europe. Ireland has taken first place in the EU contest each year since 1991.
Another student from the Dominican College in Fortwilliam Park, Lisa Sharkey (16), took the runner-up prize in the Individual Award category for her design of a quick test to identify different varieties of seed using protein detection.
Lisa, Emma, Fiona and Ciara are all in the same class in school and all holidayed together last summer in Portstewart.
The winner of the Best Individual Award was Michael Flynn (17), a student at the Christian Brothers' College in Cork. His project investigated chaotic behaviour in Irish weather, combining theory with the design and construction of an analog computer to simulate a simplified weather system.
The runners-up in the group category designed a system which uses meteor scatter - the ionised trails left behind when meteors enter the Earth's atmosphere - to transmit data over distances of up to 2,000 kilometres. Keith Martin, Robert McGlynn and Cathal Stockdale, all aged 17, are students of St David's Secondary School, Greystones, Co Wicklow.