Inuvik (Apr 04/03) - The best brains in the Beaufort Delta last week showed off their most recent experiments, drawing everything from polite smiles to looks of bewilderment.

The Beaufort Delta Regional Science Fair 2003 displayed clouds in jars, the best laundry detergent and reports on cancer were on display, but conspicuous in its absence was the ubiquitous science fair volcano.

Tuktoyaktuk cousins Ryland and Trevor Anderson represented Mangilaluk school with an audio display that reproduced sound without using speakers.

"We used a needle, cork and a frozen juice can, and we just tried with tinfoil and a matchbox and needle," Trevor said.

Trevor admits that Ryland did most of the work on the Edison Reproducer, but the guys got the idea from a science book and it took them about three weeks to finish the project.

"The needle makes small vibrations and it shoots the noise out through the box so you can hear it," Ryland said.

Bonnie Lyn Koe from Moose Kerr school in Aklavik had prepared a display on how to purify water in the wild.

"If you were in the bush in the summer and all you had was muddy lake and river water, you could use a capillary system to get clean water," Koe explains.

The system had two bowls of water, one elevated above the other, but linked with a strip of cloth.

"The dirty water goes through the cloth and the dirt stays in the cloth," she said. "You might still have to boil it, because the water may have bacteria in it."

She also demonstrated how to desalinate sea water through distillation with a hot plate and a pot of salt water.

Natasha Moore and Violet Robert from Sir Alexander Mackenzie school in Inuvik searched for the cleanest snow in town.

"We wanted to find which snow was the cleanest," Moore said.

The pair collected snow from different sites around town, melted the water and strained the water through coffee filters.

"We found that around the garbage was the cleanest and on the road was the dirtiest," Moore said.

Tony McDonald and David Kaye of Chief Julius school in Fort McPherson discovered the reason why Pepsi sinks in water, but Diet Pepsi floats.

"It's because Diet Pepsi has Aspartame and Pepsi has sugar," Kaye said. "Diet Pepsi is less dense."

"Have you ever wondered why, when they switched from the imperial system to the metric system, they never touched the time," Samuel Hearnes student Amanda Johns asks.

To answer the question, Johns and her Grade 12 friend Kristal DeBastien developed a system named after themselves -- the DeBastien Decimal System which measures time in units called Johnses.

They began with one day that was half sunlight and half darkness and divided it into ten metric hours.

"It's still the same amount of time passing, it's just measured in different units," Debastien said. "Like inches versus centimetres."

A millijohns, the smallest unit, is five-thirds of a second. She wrote a couple programs for her scientific calculator that converts Johns to hours and vice versa.

"One Johns is equal to .24 hours or 864 seconds," she said, punching buttons.

"In physics, you have to convert time-based units into seconds, which is time consuming," Debastien said. "In the metric system, you just moved the decimal place over."

Will the two Inuvik students change the world with metric time? Maybe not, but they did dust off some old brains with their new idea.

"It's a really cool idea and it's interesting to see how it will be received by people," Johns said.