When Camarria Williams, 13, stumbled upon goose poop in a neighborhood park, she enthusiastically scooped some up. She and six other students were looking for bacteria samples.
“My mom feeds animals, and I know birds eat everything and anything,” said Camarria, an eighth-grade student at William H. Brown STEM Magnet School in Chicago. “I knew there must be in bacteria in it.”
After collecting their samples, students in the Chicago Antibiotic Discovery Lab, a STEM outreach program, were taught how to isolate bacteria and program a robot to catalogue it and track antimicrobial activity. Camarria learned, with university researchers’ help, that her goose poop contained a cancer-fighting compound. She was stunned and delighted.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2024/12/22/middle-school-stem-goose-poop/
