Chana R. Schoenberger

Chana R. Schoenberger

7/06/2007 @ 4:00PM

Junior R&D

Winners at the Intel International Science & Engineering Fair are too young to drink, but they’re making discoveries that could reshape scientific knowledge.

Dmitry Vaintrob

remembers producing his first proof, that there are an infinite number of primitive Pythagorean triples (numbers like 5, 12, 13 that make the sides of a right triangle and have no common factor), at age 8. He was reinventing a wheel known to Euclid. Dmitry decided at 12 he wanted to become a mathematician like his father.

Lately Dmitry has been working on a groundbreaking proof detailing how two separate theories, the Hochschild cohomology and the Goldman bracket, can validate the idea of string topology, which uses strings, not points, to study three-dimensional shapes such as bagel-like toroids or pretzels. Dmitry introduced his proof while at MIT’s Research Science Institute, a summer camp for science fair champions and future Rhodes Scholars going into their senior year of high school.

Dmitry emigrated from Moscow with his family at the age of 2. He won $66,500 at the international fair, as well as $50,000 in this year’s Intel Science Talent Search and $100,000 in the Siemens -sponsored competition in 2006. He’ll start at Harvard this fall.

Melissa Carvell

loves to hear two uncles regale her with stories about life in the National Guard. For her science fair project she combined her fascination with the military with her several years of research into composite materials. The result was a way to reinforce soldiers’ body armor.

She and her dad, Lee, a chemical engineer at Chevron -Phillips, converted their garage into a ballistics proving ground. They built a steel drop tower that pokes through a trapdoor into the attic and is bolted to the rafters, along with a striker that plunges a bullet with a terrific crashing sound onto Kevlar-wrapped ceramic bathroom tiles 13 feet below. Under the tiles is a blob of gel that simulates a soldier’s soft flesh. Her reinforcement is a sandwich of epoxy and strips of carbon-fiber tape laid at right angles. The reinforcements made the tiles a hundred times stronger.

Melissa won $11,000 at the international fair, including Navy, Marine and Air Force awards. She’s going to spend this summer trying to patent her composite. The Marines offered to give her scrap armor from real soldiers’ vests and help her out with some real ammunition.

George Hotz

is a teen basement tinkerer. He builds competitive-battle robots, using an assortment of saws, glue guns, presses and a 3,500-pound milling machine he bought on Ebay for $700.

But the shaggy-haired teen’s real dream had always been to build a holodeck, the simulated-reality machine from Star Trek. The first step was to make a device that could project a three-dimensional image visible from all angles–a volumetric display.

George took a flat-panel computer monitor out of its plastic housing, attached it at the bottom to a wooden arm mounted on a spindle that rotates at 600rpm. He wrote software that calculates the angle of the screen at all times and decides which pixels to light up. Because the human eye sees an image for some time after it appears (think of the strobe effect), whatever image Hotz puts on the screen appears to hang in midair. Move around the machine, and you see an office chair or horse from every side, as if you were walking around it. Many applications for this gadget abound: sonography, air traffic control, videogames, war planning. The project won Hotz $20,000 at the international fair.

Nayana Ghosh-Choudhury

and her sister grew up used to hearing words they didn’t understand around the dinner table. Their parents are both biochemists at the University of Texas Health Science Center and would frequently haul their daughters into the labs to pipette solutions. The younger daughter, Nayana, naturally gravitated toward research, too. Last winter she was reading an article online about how statins, cholesterol-lowering drugs like Lipitor, were suspected of having cancer-fighting properties. She decided to test the drugs’ effect on breast cancer, the disease that killed her great-grandmother.

In her mother’s lab Nayana mixed breast cancer cells in a dish with different levels of statin, then documented the death of cells exposed to the drug. She also injected breast cancer cells into rats, measuring their tumors to prove that statin use resulted in smaller tumors. Wondering how the drug prevented cancer cells from growing, she then looked at a protein known to help the cells thrive. Exposure to statins dramatically reduces the activity of the protein in cancer cells. The project won $1,500 at the international fair for the magnet-school junior, who plans to become a doctor.

Philip Streich

stared at the data for three weeks, but nothing made sense. Last summer he and his mentor, James Hamilton, a chemistry professor at the University of Wisconsin, Platteville, were trying to figure out how to dissolve carbon nanotubes, the tiny, superstrong supermaterial of the future. Then a lightbulb–no, a laser–came on.

Scientists have assumed for years that nanotubes were insoluble. If they were soluble, it would be easy to arrange them without clumping and losing their ultrastrong properties. Boeing , for one, would love to pour nanotubes into a mold to make an ultralight spaceship, or a bridge to the moon. Streich saw how. He read about a phenomenon called Debye light scattering, which permits the measuring of solubility from the intensity of light scattered by the solution.

Pouring nanotubes into a solution of N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone-, he shot the container with a laser beam, then counted the photons bouncing out with a spectrometer. No commercial instruments were sensitive enough for the task, so he built his own, using spare parts from the lab’s reserves. The tests revealed the level at which nanotubes can be dissolved in liquid.

Philip’s parents moved the family from Princeton, N.J. to a 400-acre Wisconsin farm after the Sept. 11 attacks. They homeschool their three children, who all help out with livestock chores. Philip, the eldest, has taken 15 college courses at the university. His latest project is searching for dark matter. Philip came away with $76,650 in prize money from the international science fair.

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