Science fair girls save us from disgusto unhygienic burgers

(PHOTO: LANCE PALMER)

It’s a universal truth, like gravity. Make a ground beef patty. Cook it. And it shrinks. No matter how you swing it, what you peel off the grill will be smaller than what you slapped on it.

Turns out this very trait can be used to tell whether a burger is sufficiently cooked or not - something the fast food industry has problems with every so often (see “Beef with Burger” subhead on this list of ”The 10 Most Nauseating Stories About Bad Fast Food Meals” on CourtTv.com). The industry standard for sussing out whether all the E. Coli in your beef is fried is to temperature probe it. But this gets gross pretty fast. Imagine: probe an undone burger and then reprobe a done one and you’ve just managed to transfer a batch of germs from one to the other. Ew.

So instead, New Jersey teens Naomi Collip, Caroline Lang, and Rebecca Ehrhardt came up with the “burger cam,” which placed first at their regional Siemen’s science fair and fourth at the national one. The camera is perched above the cooking area and measures burger shrinkage, an indicator of burger done-ness and E. coli deadness.

Simply put: “We found in testing that shrinkage occurs with burger temperature so when a burger is shrunk to a certain area, it has cooked safely,” 15-year-old Rebecca Ehrhardt told abc news.

What an impressive trio. You go girls. You take universal laws of nature such as burger shrinkage and apply them to save lives.