The economy, presidential election, and Middle Eastern affairs usually take the forefront in today’s media. However, looming behind the news of rising and falling gas prices is a most alarming domestic issue, namely the obesity epidemic. There has been an occasional eye-opener, such as the documentary “Super Size Me,” to force Americans to realize the enormity of this issue. Still, some Americans neglect to acknowledge the pounds accumulating directly onto their bodies.

Nanostructures are constructed from carbon nanotubes as well as small nanoparticles on the scale of 0.000 000 001 meters. In recent years, DNA has come to be used in nanotechnology as a structural base material. DNA is prized in this regard for its unique property of Watson-Crick complementary base pairing. This natural process can be exploited to allow for the self-assembly of segments of DNA. Base pairing itself is an extremely primitive example of self-assembly.

Astronomy has always captivated me, and after being introduced to the constellation Orion at a young age, I marveled at its steadfast loyalty as it returned each winter. The night sky seemed awesome and mystifying . . . I began researching and following the patterns of the moon and the night sky, as well as lunar and solar eclipses. I was thrilled when our family got a telescope . . .

Last year, a friend of mine from camp was harassed over the Internet. Her “friends” tormented her online by sending a steady stream of emails and instant messages that threatened or insulted her. This occurred for months, and it became so extreme that she was too distressed even to go to school . . . Soon after I heard her story, I read about Megan Meier, a thirteen-year-old girl who committed suicide after receiving hurtful messages online.

I hit numerous impasses and sometimes spent hours at my local university’s library thinking and looking for theorems and tools. For example, when I started to parameterize my space curve, I ran into the problem that one of Wang et al.’s theorem that was crucial in parameterization failed for my intersection space curve projection. I was stuck, but I knew I could adapt it some way. I read ahead. I tried multiple ways of attacking this problem.

Computational science is playing a growing role in basic medical research in many ways. A key aspect of medical research and subsequent drug development is understanding exactly how biological systems operate on a macro and micro level. Through modeling of biological molecules, cells, tissues, and organs, and the networks of interactions, scientists can explore the mechanism through which these systems operate. Agent-based models are comprised of multiple, interacting agents situated within a model or simulation environment.

Certain arthropods such as the water strider and the fisher spider have acquired the unique ability to walk on the surface of the water by exploiting the phenomenon of surface tension that occurs at the airwater interface. Water striders and other water-walking arthropods distribute their weight between supporting legs, creating dimples in the water’s surface without penetrating it. These dimples push against the weight of the water strider because the water is trying to return to its original state.

In fact, for a time, I really was stuck. For the entire summer between sophomore and junior years, my research project rusted in a corner, because I had not yet discovered the true meaning of “computational” in computational biology. To me, “computational” was still the four major operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division; I was computing numbers, much like a cheap, gas-station calculator. Little did I know, however, that there is an entire field of artificial intelligence focusing on classifiers, statistical learning methods, and intelligent systems .

On my highly anticipated field trip to the ice skating rink in the eighth grade, I broke my leg within five minutes. I waited in a daze on the ice, thinking I had just sprained an ankle, until I felt the bones in my leg jiggling. The ambulance immediately came, I was shipped off, and put to sleep. When Iwoke up, Dr. Martin, a renowned orthopedic surgeon, announced to me that I had a broken tibia and fibula, both in multiple places, and am bleeding internally.