After I wrote a paper about alternative fuels for submission to a science essay competition I came to understand that energy is the root cause of many of the world's problems. Problems of pollution, food shortages, bad or insufficient water, lack of transportation, terrorism, genocide and global warming all have an energy dimension. I have come to believe that these problems could be ameliorated or even eliminated if we had an abundant and inexpensive source of renewable energy. .... Read more...
For nearly an entire week, I spent many hours a day in MIT's Hayden Library, immersing myself in introductory books on number theory and abstract algebra. It was a near-overwhelming amount of new notations, concepts, and ideas to absorb in such a short period of time, but I enjoyed the challenge and enthusiastically threw myself into mastering the mathematics necessary to solve my problem. In that short period of time, I learned the basics of group theory, radix representations, and residue classes, just to name a few..... Read more...
My advice to other high school students who wish to pursue math and science is to never feel intimidated. Problem solving techniques in engineering and science involve application of mathematics spanning various facets, such as statistics to calculus to abstract algebra and topology. When it becomes necessary to learn and apply them, do not feel intimidated by their complexity; it may be hard to understand some of these concepts at first, but it is important to be persistent. A sudden epiphany is all it takes for it to click, and it can occur at any time, as long as you have been doing all you can to expand your boundaries and learn all there is to learn about the fundamental concepts..... Read more...
By Cameron Breen - Social Science
America has become a country of excess, especially in regards to food. So, when I decided to narrow down my research interests to a branch of human psychology, obesity was the logical choice. In the last fifty years, the percentage of obese Americans has nearly tripled. And, now in 2008, more than half of all Americans are classified as being overweight (1) In this study, three possible causes of obesity were investigated. The first was the link between obesity and fat discriminability, the ability to discriminate differences in fat content. The second potential cause was sensitivity to 6-n-propylthiouracil, a compound that varies in sensitivity based on variations at the Tas2R38 gene. And the third potential cause was the possibility of "tasting" fat, as controlled by the CD36, a candidate fat taste receptor that is found on the tongue. Read more...
By Alexis Marie Mychajliw - Environmental Science
“I am Alice in Wonderland. It’s an inane statement, but it’s true. I’ve cracked the shell of reality, landing somewhere foreign and unknown. I’ve always attempted to chase small animals and to get lost in the simple web of suburban sidewalk. I’m infectiously curious; I’m constantly determined to explore. I can remember quite clearly the first time I broke the surface. I was in the mountains of upstate New York and still retained the neutral eyes of a child. One morning I took my basket to pick blackberries along the edges of a nearby forest, and I saw a buck standing beneath an apple tree. The breath left my lungs and in an instant I was after him, my basket thrown haphazardly onto the soil. He was a flurry of tawny whiteness, a larger-than-life sprite I was destined to catch. He wound through the foliage, bounding like the shadow of a falling leaf. I was nearly at my threshold, panting, fingers yearning to reach when... Read more...
By Benjamin Wasserman - Social Linguistics
Both French and Spanish have masculine v. feminine grammatical gender, while English does not have grammatical gender. For example, the phrase “the table” in English has the gender-neutral “the” preceding the word “table,” while in French and Spanish, the feminine article “la” precedes both “mesa” in Spanish and “table” in French . . . These grammatical differences between the languages led me to wonder whether there is a difference in [gender] attitudes among countries were Spanish, French, and English are predominantly spoken (Spain, France, US). Read more...
The Southern Pine Beetle (Dendroctonus frontalis), is the genus of bark beetles causing the greatest amount of damage to pine trees. Southern Pine Beetles (SPB) live in the phloem, the layer just under the bark. The beetles tunnel their way through the pine tree's phloem as they eat, cutting off the circulation of nutrients, and ultimately killing the pine. As the average temperature of the globe increases, minimum winter temperatures are no longer reaching the lower lethal point in many areas. This warming trend has permitted SPBs to migrate north to areas such as the forests in southern New Jersey where they are destroying large stands (groups) of pine trees Read more...
When I was in 8th grade my cousin and many of my friends decided to attend private high schools, instead of public schools. I began wondering if the school that you attend influences the education that you receive. I especially wanted to know what factors influenced the education that I received. My interest in equity continued to grow as I noticed disparities in schools. Time after time the districts of the upper-middle class and wealthy would take home the prize from math and science competitions as my school rode slumped and glum faced in the bus back to school. Read more...
Even though, at that point, I had a feeling that pressure was the cause of Rodriguez's failures, I still did not really know why such a thing would happen. How could somebody perform so well in unimportant game-situations and so poorly in the important ones? I was intrigued and was determined to find out. Yerkes and Dodson had found that there was a relationship between arousal and the performance of any task. When arousal was very low, people did not have any motivation to perform their task well, and, as a result, performed poorly. As arousal increased and became more moderate, performance steadily increased, but when arousal became too high, performance decreased again. Read more...
As I opened up the local section, I saw an image of a tennis racket strung in a strange fashion. This intrigued me, so I decided to read the article. I soon discovered that several years earlier a local woman named Madeline Hauptman had co-patented a diagonally strung tennis racket featuring opposite pairs of equidistant strings strung in a diagonal fashion. She claimed that as a result of this congruency of string length, vibrations are more evenly dispersed following a tennis shot, reducing the level of vibration directed onto a given player's forearm and possibly preventing tennis elbow. The article I was reading was a profile of PowerAngle, Mrs. Hauptman's small diagonally strung racket company. I immediately rushed to my computer to find out some more information on PowerAngle. To my excitement, I found out that Mrs. Hauptman's diagonally strung tennis rackets had never been scientifically tested or compared to conventional rackets. Read more...
Every winter, hundreds of people die needlessly in snowstorms, often unwarned and unable to comprehend the dangers they will face; at the same time, millions of dollars in government and private resources are lost when unforecasted storms suddenly develop or when anticipated major events fail to materialize. Seasonal snowfall forecasting algorithms with short and long term accuracy can eliminate or minimize each of these societal concerns . . . My experiment in seasonal snowfall forecasting aimed to combine three schools of meteorological thinking and break new ground in accurate long term winter forecasting. The experiment I have laid out was designed precisely so that it can be repeated at any location on earth with sufficient climate data. I consider my Intel project to be the ultimate expression of my lifelong passion for weather, beginning as early as my 6th birthday when the Blizzard of 1996 set new snowfall records across the East Coast. Read more...
As Dr. Wilson explained to me, researchers had recently developed computational methods known as "local methods," which made certain approximations to decrease the expense of working with larger molecules. In the description of space employed by local methods, electrons interact mainly with other electrons that occupy spatially close orbitals; with conventional methods, all electrons interact with each other. This approximation reduces the number of integrals the computational program has to evaluate, and thus reduces the computational cost. However, this also reduces the accuracy of local methods. I sought to discover whether local second second-order Møller-Plesset perturbation theory [LMP2] energies systematically converged to a CBS limit and to discover how the accuracy of LMP2 with respect to canonical MP2 varied across basis set levels, including at the CBS limit. Read more...
I decided to create a survey that would not only measure the level of teenage financial literacy of the population I would study but would also give me insight on teen spending and saving habits, the sources of financial information for teens, and other facts of information concerning teenage financial awareness. Making a survey is by no means a simple manner. For instance, you have to take into consideration the level of difficulty you must make each question, you must make sure that each question can be fairly answered by each individual who happens to take your survey, and most importantly, you must make sure that your survey is not too long or difficult so that people will actually want to fill out your survey. Read more...
Inflammation occurs when leukocytes (white blood cells) leave the blood stream by passing between endothelial cells, the cells that line the walls of blood vessels, and move into the surrounding tissue. Endothelial cells actively change shape to allow leukocytes to pass between them, but this requires an increase in surface area that would not normally be allowed by a cell membrane. To allow this shape change, extra membrane and molecules that assist in the migration of the leukocytes are released from a compartment in endothelial cells called the Lateral Border Recycling Compartment (LBRC). The membrane in this compartment is constantly recycling in and out of the cell. This recycling is important in inflammation, but is very difficult to study experimentally and much is unknown about it. Read more...
Math can be an intimidating field. To work on some problems, one must know decades or centuries of background before one can even understand the question. However, what tends to get lost in all of that is that math can be fun, even for the relatively uninitiated. There are problems in mathematics that are discrete (essentially, self-contained) and with some combination of background research, mathematical thought, and appropriate mentoring, they are easily within reach of the high school student. Generally, random walks on graphs are approximated by computing the expected hitting time, or probable number of random moves required to go from one vertex to another. Although random walks are useful in mathematics and computer science, probabilistic systems do not offer sufficient precision for some applications. There are, however, several emerging methods of deterministically simulating random walks which can be used to more efficiently compute hitting times [4, 6]. One such deterministic simulation uses a process known as chip-firing. Read more...
University of Chicago
Professor David Mazziotti
Editor