Chinese Kiwi students find limewater effective in preserving flax
Photo:
Supplied
A trio of Chinese Kiwi students from a North Auckland school have taken home a science award for their research into preserving flax.
Annie He, Kay Wu and Linda Chen from Pinehurst School, all 15 years old, won the Cambridge Science Competition's Country Award for identifying limewater as an effective preservative.
Inspired by kaitiakitanga, a Māori term meaning guardianship and protection of the natural environment, the team aimed to find out an efficient way to preserve traditional Māori flax artifacts.
The group identified limewater, sodium bicarbonate solution and sodium hydroxide solution as potential alkalis they wanted to test.
Flax soaking in different alkalis, allowing the students to measure and compare the effectiveness of different treatments.
Photo:
Supplied
Using different cuts of flax, the team measured the change in mass of the flax before and after being added to the different alkalis, pH of flax before and after the treatment, the flax's fibre quality as well as their tensile strength.
The team found that among the three solutions, limewater minimised mass loss, maximised tensile strength and maintained fibre health during storage.
Judges praised the students for their cultural conservation and treatment of the flax in a sustainable way, according to the competition's website.
Team member Kay Wu said they chose the topic of flax preservation to spread awareness about the growing challenges in protecting cultural artifacts.
"This project deepened my scientific understanding and inspired me to become a more eager learner," Wu said.
Annie He said the limewater must be diluted to a safe concentration.
She said the team were looking forward to further investigating factors affecting flax preservation involving limewater, including optimum soaking duration, temperature, concentration of the solution and long-term preservation.
"We believe this method has potential to preserve flax on a larger scale, as limewater is readily available and environmentally friendly," He said.
"However, we don't recommend attempting this at home as we have only investigated the short-term effectiveness," she said. "In the long term, there may be different results."
Sandy Liu, a teacher at Pinehurst School, applauded the students' teamwork and dedication.
"Their efficiency and collaboration were outstanding," Liu said. "They treated the flax with care and respect, showing both curiosity and responsibility."
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
RNZ News
4 hours ago
- RNZ News
Scientists monitor cluster of earthquakes in lower North Island
Earth Sciences say they are monitoring a cluster of earthquakes centred off the east coast of the lower North Island this week. At least 34 quakes have been recorded west of Castlepoint in the last seven days - with the strongest measuring a magnitude of 4.2 in the early hours of Monday morning. Photo: GeoNet At least 34 quakes have been recorded west of Castlepoint in the last seven days - with the strongest measuring a magnitude of 4.2 - at depths of about 20 kilometres. On-call seismologist Sam Taylor-Offord said a concentrated sequence events typically indicated a "much more intense" process than the usual background noise of seismic activity. "You can think about it as something that is unfolding. It's a process. "Every earthquake pushes a little bit of the stress that releases into the area around it and then that can create a cascade of increasing the stress in the rock surrounding it. That rock breaks - it increases the stress in the rock around it - that rock breaks and that's your sequence playing out," Taylor-Offord said. But he said - along the line of subducting tectonic plates which characterised the fault along the east coast of the North Island - the quakes could also be associated with multiple "slow slip" events. Subduction was the process where one tectonic plate was forced beneath another into the Earth's mantle. "If you think of it as a very large earthquake that's happening but it's happening over weeks and months. "It's still changing the stress in the surrounding area and in some places the earth breaks in a related way to that movement. That tends to break in a sequence. So that's one of the things that might be happening," Taylor-Offord said. Taylor-Offord said the agency was looking into the pattern but it did not necessarily indicate an increased risk of a large quake in the area. "Sometimes a sequence will precede a larger earthquake, sometimes nothing will come of it. Science is not quite at the point where we can say 'that one, not that one'," he said. He said - on the flip side - it was not possible to infer that a quake cluster was indicating a gradual release of pressure which could ward off a larger quake. "We have earthquakes like this all the time and - so far - they haven't stopped the larger earthquake coming. "Perhaps a weaker fault [is] breaking but elsewhere there is a strong fault that is still accumulating that stress and will someday rupture in an earthquake. It's a fact of life," Taylor-Offord said. He said the agency was also monitoring another cluster of just under 30 weak quakes centred south east of Seddon over the last month. He said those quakes were more likely to be the remnants of aftershock sequences from the 2016 Kaikōura quake which was centred nearby. Taylor-Offord said the activity was a reminder for people to stay prepared for a major event. "Small earthquakes are good because they remind us that bigger quakes are possible. These are regions very close to the plate boundary where we have a lot of stress and a lot of strain and we expect large earthquakes in the future as we have seen in the past," Taylor-Offord said.
RNZ News
9 hours ago
- RNZ News
Shoe-box sized device helps growers detect diseases
The two-year trial at Pukekohe involving BioScout units aims to help growers make better disease management decisions. Photo: Supplied A new device is helping growers detect diseases out of thin air. The two-year trial at Pukekohe involving BioScout units aims to help growers make better disease management decisions. Three of the shoe box-sized units have been set up by Te Ahikawariki Vegetable Industry Centre of Excellence (VICE) with support from Vegetables New Zealand Inc, Onions NZ and Potatoes New Zealand. They sit upon a stand and are powered by solar panels. A small intake on the front of the machine collects air samples which pass over a bit of tape. Daniel Sutton, research development and extension manager for Vegetables New Zealand, explained a microscopic camera take images of the particles - such as pollen or fungal spores - which are stuck to the tape and then analysed by artificial intelligence to see if they carry disease. "What we're doing is using this tool to evaluate the amount of disease spores in the air and we're looking at ground truthing that in terms of the range of different vegetable crops that we grow in the area - potatoes, onions, lettuce, brassicas, carrots and the like," Sutton said. "We're trying to evaluate what we're seeing in the machine versus what we're seeing in the crop." Sutton said this tool would help "fill in the gap" around the pathogen and provide a continual flow of information of what disease is around and how much of it. "Disease infection 101 is you need a susceptible host, you need the environment to be favourable for the disease to infect and you need the pathogen to be present." He said it will help them identify some of the "big" diseases like target spot in potatoes and white mould in carrots. It was an "exciting" example of how technology was helping the sector. Sutton said, if they worked as expected, the hope was to establish a network of such BioScout units across major vegetable growing regions in the country. There are about 20 such units across the country, with arable farmers and grape growers having also adopted the tech. "If they can all talk and connect to one another than we'd actually have a nationwide network looking for these key diseases for us." Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
RNZ News
10 hours ago
- RNZ News
University building AI tool to help te reo Māori learners with real time pronunciation feedback
The University of Auckland, Photo: RNZ / Yiting Lin Auckland University is building a new AI tool that will give te reo Māori learners real time, personalised feedback on their pronunciation. The three-year project is funded with a $1 million research grant from the Ministry of Business and Innovation's Smart Ideas. Head of Auckland Universities' Te Puna Wananga, Dr Piata Allen told Checkpoint the idea is to give te reo Māori learners confidence so they use more te reo more of the time. Allen (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Hinemanu, Ngā Wairiki Ngāti Apa) said the AI tool will give real time feedback to users who are speaking te reo Māori and give feedback on the specific sounds they are making. "When you pronounce sounds you are... making different shapes with your mouth, you are positioning your tongue differently to make different sounds, so in order to make the sounds you want to make you've got to get those things right and what the app is going to do is to help you understand what the sounds are that you might be struggling with and how to correct that." The te reo Māori 'R' sound is one that can cause new learners some trouble, she said. "Quite commonly we say that you need to roll your Rs, however in te reo Māori actually the R sound is a tap or a flap. Which is quite similar to the sound you make when you say words like Daddy, Maddie, Paddy, those types of sounds, so you get that double d sound, that tap, you just tap the roof of your mouth once." Allen said the app will be able to explain to people the movement they need to make in order to get the sound they are trying to make and how to adjust. "Rather than just tell people that this is right and that is wrong we are able to give them a bit more specific feedback." Currently Auckland University runs an an online pronunciation course where students record themselves reading a bilingual text then switch between pronunciation, the tutors then listen to the sounds they are making and give them feedback on a syllable basis, she said. "That's quite labour intensive and quite time intensive and we aren't able to scale that as widely as we'd like, so incorporating AI into that process means we're able to give more people access." Allen said that giving feedback on articulation of sounds is a specific skill that people need to be trained in to do effectively. The language model will be trained on the existing repository of recorded te reo, such as from the archives of iwi radio stations, she said. "So we do have a significant repository of te reo Māori sounds, however what we will need to do is train a model around the acceptable range of pronunciation that we are looking for, because there is always going to be a range with language." When it comes to training a language model some sort of framework is needed in order to train the model, Allen said, so the first thing to do is establish what the range is for te reo Māori. The project is running for three years and Allen said they have that to establish te range of correct pronunciation, to develop the feedback tool, to test it with a group of users and to look at how it can be scaled from there. "We want to have as many people using the tool as possible, so we really want it to be available far and wide, exactly how we scale that we haven't quite worked that through yet, we're just going to be focussing on the research at this stage but then as we progress through the project we'll be looking at how we can scale it." Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
