Dasia Taylor, a teenager in Iowa, likes beets. She may or may not like to eat them, but she likes to use them to save lives. When her high school chemistry teacher encouraged the students to enter a state-wide science fair, Dasia got to work on her beets.

Now I usually just use beets to turn all my food pink because it’s fun, but Dasia uses them to dye stitches. Evidently, the PH of human skin is 6. When it’s infected, the PH grows to 8 or 9. Turns out beet juice changes from the that pretty pink color to purple when the PH raises to 8 or 9. So I guess if my food turns out purple, it’s not a good idea to eat it.

So with the beet-juice stained sutures, if they turn purple, bad news. It means there’s an infection and the sutures may have alerted us to the problem before any other symptom. Dasia points out that this is especially important in developing countries where other forms of infection detection may not be as readily available. So beets can save lives. And Dasia was a finalist in the science fair.

You can check out the full article and a video of Dasia by following this link: https://nerdist.com/article/teenager-invents-color-changing-sutures-that-detect-infection/