The cures to all the diseases in the world are hidden in the giant, colourful spiral used in the St Gerard's School project, according to the three pupils from Bray who made it. The small balls represent atoms of all the elements on the periodic table and are arranged in a spiral in order of the lightest to the heaviest elements.
If homeopathic remedies were made out of these elements, disease would be a thing of the past, explained Lauren Norton (14), Sarah Doyle (14) and Rachael Murphy (13). To prove the effects of homeopathic remedies and how they can cure, the girls conducted experiments on leaves.
A leaf which was placed in a jar containing arnica 30C, a homeopathic remedy, a month ago had remained perfect, perky and green. Other leaves placed in water or the wrong type of remedy did not look so healthy and the girls said this was because arnica 30C got rid of bruising.
There may not be a remedy for bad smells, but Catherine Greene (16) and Siobhan Butler (15), from Crana College in Buncrana, Co Donegal, have come up with an idea which could eliminate bad bathroom odours.
A hose attached to the back of the toilet seat is designed to extract nasty smells from their makeshift toilet bowl and blows the smells outside. In a series of experiments the girls conducted using different stink bombs, they found that their "Vent-a-Loo" eliminated the strongest odour in only two minutes 25 seconds. The toilet contraption took between two and three months to make and could also be used in farm slurry pits.
The girls reckon the idea could take off, and have already had some interest expressed in it. "Some of my aunties were looking for one," said Catherine. Another project which attracted delight from family members also featured inventions. Brothers Noel (18) and Nick (16) Ryan, from St Enda's School in Limerick, designed four tools to make life easier for elderly people and used their grandmother to test the equipment.
A handle attached to plastic bags to make it easier to carry shopping, a forked tongs for gripping coal and logs more easily and a basket to fit onto a Zimmer frame all went down very well with the boys' granny. The tool she found most useful, though, was a hook attached to the back of a phone so the handset could be held more easily.
Noel, in sixth year, and Nick, in fourth year, also tried out their equipment on some of the people in St Camillus's, a local nursing home, and got a good response.
If that doesn't shake you, then Caitriona Conway's study of earthquakes will. The 16-year-old from Rosary College in Crumlin, Dublin, examined the relationship between earthquakes and sunspots. Caitriona collected her data over the last two years from studies done on the occurrence of earthquakes along the San Andreas fault in California and separate studies done on sunspots. By bringing the two pieces of research together, it would seem that more earthquakes occur when there are fewer sunspots.
So has she cracked an age-old problem of predicting earthquakes which could save millions of lives? "No, I've only proved that there is a correlation," Caitriona said, displaying the signs of a true scientist.
A study on attitudes to bats by Eimear Fitzgerald (16), from Mary Immaculate secondary school in Lisdoonvarna, Co Clare, has shown that the tiny nocturnal animals do not have the best press.
Most older people interviewed by Eimear believed that bats were blind and liable to get caught in human hair. These were just myths which possibly came about by bats' poor eyesight and their swooping nature when collecting food, Eimear explained.