High Schooler Is Awarded $100,000 For Research

wired_LAIN writes "A teenager from Oklahoma was awarded $100,000 in the Intel Science Talent Search competition for building an inexpensive and accurate spectrograph that can identify the specific characteristics of different kinds of molecules. While normal spectrographs can cost between $20,000 and $100,000 to build, her spectrograph cost less than $500. The 40 finalists' projects were judged by a panel of 12 scientists, all well established in their respective fields. Among the judges were Vera Rubin, who proved Dark Matter, and Andrew Yeager, one of the pioneers of stem cell research."

Comments

"Awarded" or "Paid"?

[timeOday]

Does she keep the rights to her invention, or does somebody else get ownership of them? This sounds like a potentially valuable invention.

cheaper space probes

[mastershake_phd]

Strap this thing on a rocket. $500 million to send a probe to mars? I bet we could do it for $250,000, maybe be less if it leaves on a tuesday.

Other winners

[jotok]

From the Intel Science Talent Search website:

Second Place: John Pardon, 17, of Chapel Hill, N.C., solved a classical open problem in differential geometry
Third Place: Dmitry Vaintrob, 18, of Eugene, Ore., proved that loop homology and Hochschild cohomology coincide for an important class of spaces
Fourth Place: Catherine Schlingheyde, 17, of Oyster Bay, N.Y., for her research on microRNA repression
Fifth Place: Rebecca Kaufman, 17, of Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., for her study of the effects of male hormones in a model of schizophrenia
Sixth Place: Gregory Brockman, 18, of Thompson, N.D., for his mathematics project that provided a thorough analysis of Ducci sequences
Seventh Place: Megan Blewett, 17, of Madison, N.J., for her analysis of a protein that may be implicated in multiple sclerosis and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
Eighth Place: Daniel Handlin, 18, of Lincroft, N.J., for developing an accurate, low-cost method of determining the position of geo-stationary Earth-orbit (GEO) satellites
Ninth Place: Meredith MacGregor, 18, of Boulder, Colo., for her research on the fluid dynamics of the "Brazil Nut Effect"
Tenth Place: Emma Call, 18, of Baltimore, Md., for the fabrication of 3-D microcubes

I'm amazed at what these kids were able to accomplish. How much support did they have? What schools do they attend? How much money were they granted to accomplish their research?

In any case, I have two thoughts on this:
One, good teachers and money can't make stupid kids smart, but they sure as hell can enable really smart kids to shine. I wonder how this ties in with Bill Gates' recent announcements concerning the state of science and math education in American schools.

Two, I notice a complete lack of representation by the "soft" sciences. Is it because the people writing the grants share the same disdain for disciplines that lack explanatory power as everyone else, or is it because it's easier to set up a biology program than a sociology program? I suspect a little of both--you probably need far more social context than an 18-year-old will have to pursue studies of voter demographics (not to mention the data acq is probably beyond their capabilities).

But some of that context used to be handled by education as well--you had to read the classics, you had to study some philosophy, you had to know history. My aero engineer friend has really never done any of that, so he's an engineer who doesn't know what "empiricism" means. Is this also a failing by our educational system? Isn't such education necessary to be a good researcher?

Re:Other winners

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading the summaries of the projects shows that one of those is my colleague's Masters physics project. Wonder if I should tell him?
Ouch. (by which I mean congrats, kids)

Re:Other winners

[i_should_be_working]

So 6 out of the top 10 are females. What the hell happens after high school? Maybe things are just getting better with this generation.

Unrelated. Usually with some high level math theory title I understand the individual words by themselves, but not all together. But that 3rd place title. Holy crap. 3 words I've never even heard of.

After Watching Idiocracy....

[Paulrothrock]

I think she and the other contest winners should be put into a forced breeding program. We need more genes like hers in the pool.

Re:Accurate? Is it Calibrated?

[644bd346996]

She measured the spectra of known household substances and got numbers that fit with published data. That is a decent basis for calling it accurate, especially when you consider that her design can probably be improved quite a bit without making it much more expensive. A mass-produced, quality-controlled spectrograph based off her design could revolutionize the way such devices are used, because they are so cheap.

Re:They've been building them for 500 bucks for ye

[imsabbel]

Well, in fact its not that easy.
For example, your cheap diode laser is temperature dependent. As the (anti)stokes raman lines are energy shifts from the baseline, using a normal laser will give you different callibrations for different energies. So you want a temperature stabilized one (e.g. thermoelectric cooling with feedback loop).
Now you got 1k instead of 500.
Same goes for the prisma. You really want a grating, for good results. $2k.

Then every single one has to be calibrated and tested.
And then you actually want to make profit.

The barely existing economy of scale doesnt really help much.

Re:This nation...

[shbazjinkens]

I know a guy that went to her high school. He was expelled and served with terrorism charges when a rocket demonstration went bad and set a field on fire. School officials claimed he was trying to burn the school down?
 
With schools like that, Oklahoma can't lose! I laud her for her devotion to science, because I know exactly what kind of barriers and punishments there are for that kind of devotion here. Until that changes, girls and boys like her will continue to be extremely rare.