Russ Swan does his bit for volunteer science.
I’m a bit of a sucker for signing up to citizen science initiatives. Most of these are fairly passive endeavours demanding little more than some basic observation skills and the ability to count, such as the survey this yearn which culminated in Butterfly Conservation issuing a dramatic sounding ‘butterfly emergency’.
Not that this emergency seems to have made any difference in Downing Street. Despite the supposed change of political philosophy brought about in July, there’s no suggestion yet that the despised neonicotinoid (neonic) pesticides already illegal in the rest of the civilised world will actually be banned in the UK.
I’ve taken part in projects involving sitting in the garden looking for butterflies, sitting in the garden looking for birds, sitting at a monitor looking at images of galaxies, and even sitting doing nothing except allowing a screensaver to access my PC’s processor whenever it went into sleep mode. That last one, sifting raw data from SETI in the hope of finding aliens, earned me a solid bollocking from my IT manager – until he realised what a cool project it was.
Being inquisitive, I asked what actual chemistry was taking place
This latest project was a little different, and the first I’ve been involved with that involved actual wet chemistry. Organised by Earthwatch, the project recruited thousands of people to go out on a given weekend to take water samples from their local streams and rivers.
Each was provided with a small chemistry set – cuvette, a couple of closed plastic tubes containing a few grains of powder, and a colour chart.
Not very long ago, asking a member of the general public to do actual chemistry for the sake of a good deed would have been, as they say around here, a hiding to nothing. But then came Covid, and all those people who claimed they ‘could never do’ science at school were adroitly performing lateral flow tests as if their life depended on it.
Which – well, you get it.
My wet chemistry experiments turned out to be rather wetter than expected, as on the day it was fairly hissing down. Off I trotted to the local beck, dressed like an extra from Moby Dick, trying not to allow my water samples to be diluted by the rain.
Being inquisitive, I asked what actual chemistry was taking place – and you’re just as nerdy as me, so here goes: Nitrate was measured by a Griess reaction using zinc, which reduces nitrate (NO– 3) in the sample to nitrite (NO– 2), with a colourimetric reaction to produce an azo dye. Phosphate PO4 was detected using 4-amino-antipyrine with phosphatase enzyme to produce hydrogen peroxide, which also undergoes a colourimetric reaction.
It’s then a matter of eyeballing the sample tubes after an exact time interval, and comparing them to a standard reference chart. Earthwatch reckons this gives about 80% accuracy by the citizen scientists compared to lab results. Obviously not as good as your lab. Results are being compiled as I write, but an earlier ‘water blitz’ showed that both my water authority and my county had some of the worst results in the country. Why?
Fertiliser. Which is basically a euphemism for the way I feel about the cavalier attitude of some farmers and every bloody government we’ve had this century.
