Budding scientists earn top scholarships - Westinghouse Science Talent Search

Science News, March 14, 1992 by Carol Ezzell

What do clam shells, tennis balls and a desktop computer have in common? These disparate objects - plus hard work and imagination - helped the top three winners of this year's Westinghouse Science Talent Search earn a total of $90,000 in scholarships.

Last week, Kurt Steven Thorn of Shoreham-Wading River H.S. in Shoreham, N.Y., Claudine Deborah Madras of the Winsor School in Boston and Michael Shayne Agney of Melbourne (Fla.) H.S. accepted first, second and third place in the 51st annual science competition sponsored by Westinghouse Electric Corp. and administered by Science Service, Inc.

Thorn, 16, won the top prize, a $40,000 scholarship, for detecting trace elements in clam shells. A physics teacher helped his gain access to Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., where he used X-rays from a synchrotron to measure levels of strontium and iron in the clam shells. Thorn found that the levels of these trace elements in the shells correlated with their concentrations in the seawater in which the clams grew.

Second-place winner Madras, 17, won a $30,000 scholarship for her predictions of the rotation rate of the asteroid 951 Gaspra, which the Galileo space probe observed at close range during a flyby last year (SN: 11/23/91, p.326). Madras predicted the egg-like shape of Gaspra months before the Galileo encounter by matching the light-reflection pattern of the real asteroid with those of models she constructed using tennis balls coated with moldable plastic. NASA used her calculations in planning Galileo's photogaphy of Gaspra.

Neural networks were the topic of Agney's third-prize project, which earned him a $20,000 scholarship. The 17-year-old used his own desktop computer to simulate a neutral network that directed a simulated robotic arm to "see" and catch a simulated bouncing ball.

Scholarships of $15,000 each went to fourth-place winner Leonid Natanovich Reyzin of Sinai Academic Center in New York City, who simulated walking robots; fifth-place winner Patricia R. Bachiller of Scotch Plains-Fanwood H.S. in Scotch Plains, N.J., who studied bird songs; and sixth-place winner Christopher Marshall Linn Bouton of Saint Ann's School in New York City, who found a protein involved in mammalian heat regulation.

The judges awarded four $10,000 scholarships. Seventh-place winner Erica Beth Goldman of Hunter College H.S. in New York City won hers for discovering that oxygen-starved sea stars turn upside down to breathe. Eight-place winner Peter Gabriel Khalifah of Shawnee Mission (Kan.) South H.S. received his for developing artificial red blood cells. Benjamin Che-Ming Jun of Montgomery Blair H.S. in Silver Spring Mid., won ninth place for building a computer-controlled roommapping system. And Robin Ann Niles of Commack (N.Y.) H.S. placed 10th for splicing a nerve-cell protein into liver cells.

Winners were selected from 40 finalists during a week-long visit to Washington, D.C. The remaining 30 finalists won $1,000 scholarships.