A decoratively cloth-covered yoga ball may or may not have had something to do with the disruptive anomaly that was 2020.
âThatâs the earth,â Mt. Lebanon High School student Nikki LaSota purports. âWeâre going to shake her up a little bit and see what happens.â
Nikki LaSota sits atop the earth, made from a yoga ball and patchwork fabric to match the Sisters Grimmâs hand-sewn pantsuit and to resemble the chaos of 2020, the skitâs theme. Both the Earth and the costume were made from the remnants of the fabric used to make homemade masks at the beginning of the COVID-19 quarantine.
Natalie McGeeâs could help save an important underwater resource.
The Mt. Lebanon High School juniorâs research and experimentation focusing on a seldom-studied marine animal earned her a divisional first-place finish in the recent Pittsburgh Regional Science and Engineering Fair.
Perhaps more importantly, âExamining the Effects of Marine Microplastics on Porifera Microbial Filtrationâ pursues a potential avenue toward reversing the disappearance of earthâs coral reefs.
At issue is whether tiny plastic pollutants are inhibiting sponges, they of the phylum Porifera, from their normal function of consuming microbes and removing potentially harmful bacteria from the water.
âIt was a topic that apparently had been overlooked by scientists until very recently, because a lot of the focus right now is on animals that actually consume the microplastics as food and how that could be a problem,â Natalie said.