While there are still plenty of high school
science fair projects that involve breeding fruit flies or
building baking-soda-powered volcanoes, today's elite junior
scientists are involved in experiments of such sophistication that
the ordinary mortal is hopelessly baffled.
Take, for example, the winners of the
1999 Intel
Science Talent Search—the titles of the
experiments themselves are enough to bring on mental vertigo.
One 17-year-old's experiment was called
Lexical Steganography
through Adaptive Modulation of the Word Choice Hash. Another
submitted
Quantum Calculations to Determine Electrical
Properties for Molecular Electronic Rectifying Diodes.
And then there's the title of the 1st place experiment, conducted
by 14-year-old Natalia Toro, of Boulder, Colorado:
Independent
Analysis of Evidence for nu_mu <--> nu_tau Oscillations in
the Super Kamiokande Atmospheric Neutrino Data.
Click here for a list of the 2001
top ten winners, or for more
about the
Intel Science Talent
Search, and its predecessor, the
Westinghouse Science
Talent Search.
Awestruck? Keep in mind that, when compared to their international
peers in
eigth grade science
achievement, American students come in a mediocre 14th
place. Imagine the science prodigies of the highest ranked
countries—
Singapore, the
Czech
Republic,
Japan,
Korea,
and
Bulgaria.