In the summer prior to my sophomore year, I remember reading a Wall Street Journal article titled "Feeding Billions, a Grain at a Time," discussing how both rising food prices and climate change threatened decades of progress on global agriculture. Then, a few months later, The New York Times launched an article series called “The Food Chain,” highlighting issues in international agriculture. I found it puzzling that while two prominent newspapers were featuring agriculture coverage, very few people in the United States were aware of global food issues. And that’s when I realized an unfortunate reality of the American people: our country is complacent about its food supply. The federal government’s subsidies to large farms guarantee a stable food supply, leading Americans to take their food security for granted. But upon reading those Wall Street Journal and New York Times articles, I began to formulate the vision that agriculture is the fundamental issue in the developing world . . . Competition between food and fuel is a major obstacle to feeding a world whose population, according to the United Nations, is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050. That dynamic encouraged me, for my Intel Science Talent Search project, to research how the use of poplar as a biofuel could avoid displacement of food crops by biofuels... Read more...
Looking up at night, it is easy to get lost in the grandeur of the view. Space seems infinite and the myriad stars inspire a multitude of feelings. Ever since I can remember, I wanted to understand the great mysteries of the universe first getting excited via buzz words like "black holes" and "curved space time." Such fascinating ideas easily captivated my childhood curiosity . . . My interest started to become more tangible in elementary school when the school's librarian recommended me to read Stepehen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time." With the help of my father I finished the book and became noticeably more interested in astrophysics. I began dreaming of becoming a research scientist much like Einstein and discovering how the universe "works." . . . My research project looked at a mathematical function called the two-point correlation function and applied it to measure the clustering of galaxies in a radio survey of the sky. This is important because it was the first time such an analysis was done in a frequency relevant to a new area of astrophysics called 21 cm tomography which hopes to give us precise measurements of cosmological parameters and insight into the very early universe... Read more...
Adolescents who exercise regularly are less likely to be overweight or obese. The population chosen is adolescents in the age group of 12 to 19. Adolescent overweight and obesity is very prevalent in the United States. Results of National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES, 2) 2003-04 study points out that 16% of adolescents nationwide are overweight. It is a huge human health issue because obesity increases the risk of serious health conditions like type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. Obese and overweight adolescents may also prone to low self-esteem that stems from being teased and bullied. Other diseases related to obesity are liver & gall bladder disease, depression, sleep disorders, bone and joint problems... Read more...
First noted in the United States in 1980, the obesity epidemic has since increased twofold in recent decades. In the 21st century, obesity has become one of the leading health problems in the United States; over 34% of all adults age 20 years and over and 18% of all children age 6-11 years are obese (CDC Faststats, Obesity and Overweight). In fact, obesity is more prevalent in the United States than in other Westernized country. With obesity comes a vast array of health concerns including hypertension, glaucoma, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, certain cancers and heart disease. According to the National Institutes of Health, obesity is one of the leading cause of preventable death in the US, second only to tobacco usage; obesity-related conditions cause approximately 300,000 deaths a year . . . As a sophomore in high school, I did not know much about the obesity epidemic and I vaguely understood the concept of eating healthy and exercising regularly. When I first entered the basement of the Neurological Institute of New York, I did not plan on applying to the Intel Competition nor had I decided to obesity research. Rather, I joined the Columbia University Medical Center’s Program for Imaging and Cognitive Sciences (PICS) at the end of sophomore year because a strange fascination with the brain . . . I wanted to understand why individuals found food so mouthwateringly attractive, and how the brain normally controls food intake; using the resources provided at the fMRI lab, I hope to better understand and prevent obesity and save lives... Read more...
Dengue fever affects 50-100 million people annually (Rigau, 1998). Scientists have recently developed genetic manipulation techniques to create transgenic mosquitoes refractory to disease transmission. The success of this strategy hinges on the dispersal of such genes throughout a population via matings of transgenic with wild-type mosquitoes. However, little is known about mating competitiveness of transgenic mosquitoes, or female mating patterns of mosquitoes in general . . . This study explored assortative mating of mosquitoes. Mating frequencies when a wildtype female mosquito was exposed to ten wild-type and ten mutant (Higgs white-eye) males were evaluated. The twenty males were placed in a bucket cage and a female was introduced. Immediately after copulation, the pair was aspirated out and the male eye color examined to determine its phenotype. A male of the same phenotype was replaced and the procedure repeated. A majority of matings resulted in the copulation of mutant males with wild-type females... Read more...
I hear like an 85-year-old man, but I am not alone. Twenty-five million Americans are already affected by hearing loss (Hearing lost statistics), and this staggering number is expected to double by 2050 (qtd. in Schmid), especially considering how many students are currently damaging their ears by the combination of loud music and earphones. What they do not realize is that sound has a physical force that damages the stereocilia, the delicate hair cells in the cochlea that pick up vibrations. Once broken, those cells do not regenerate. The vast majority of people can expect hearing damage as they age. Others, like me, have damage from ototoxins; life-saving drugs like the ones that saved my life as a premature infant can cause unfortunate hearing impairment. That is the personal problem that led to my two-year science project, Do You =ear Wha‘ I =ear?, which explores the revolutionary concept of lowering sounds in pitch rather than simply making them louder. Current hearing aid technology is still based on increasing the volume; however, I know from personal experience that hearing aids really do not work well... Read more...
The summer after my junior year, I went to the Research Science Institute (RSI) program at MIT. I had a blast there, and I strongly encourage any eligible students reading this to apply. I had two mentors: a graduate student named Dustin Clausen and a professor named Pavel Etingof. My mentors contacted me before the program to tell me about a potential project on representation theory in complex rank, following a paper of Deligne that laid the groundwork and beginning work on a program that Etingof himself had proposed in a talk at the Newton Institute. There were a few obstacles. First, Deligne writes in French. It's a good thing that I take the language in school, but I'm not terribly fluent. Fortunately, mathematicians tend not to use diffcult words; most of the technical math jargon consists of cognates anyway. Recognizing "categorie" as "category" does not require translator-level skills. A more serious diffculty was that Deligne's paper is hard. Academic math papers in general have a tendency to focus on correctness over understandability (the word "trivial" is used very differently by research mathematicians and other people, for instance). Deligne's paper also heavily uses the language of category theory, a branch of mathematics whose dryness has earned it the nickname "abstract nonsense" among mathematicians... Read more...
From the very beginning of civilization, humans have pondered their future through innumerable myths and legends. Through the times of the ancient Greeks’ tales, with their stories of oracles prophesying the ruin of empires, and the Middle Ages, with seers like Nostradamus appearing to peek into the future, the idea of an ultimate destiny has become an obsession for many. Only nowadays do we have the scientific tools coupled with ultra-fast processing power necessary to make a well-substantiated picture of the distant future of the Solar System, which seems harbor large uncertainties for this planet. With the greatly increased radiation of an evolving Sun, our survival comes into question . . . Expansion of the Sun in the future will cause conditions to be vastly different from those today, leaving the Earth unsustainable. This study intends to establish which Solar System object will be most conducive to the survival of humans during five stages of solar evolution: (1) further along the main sequence at age 8.40 billion years (Ga), (2) during the red giant stage at 11.93 Ga (3) 6 million years (Ma) later prior to the helium flash (4) after the helium flash at age 12.17 Ga and (5) the beginning of core crystallization at age 12.23 Ga. The Evolve ZAMS code (Paxton, 2004) determines the mass and luminosity of the Sun at these stages. Semi-major axis lengths of each of the solar system objects (SSOs) are calculated based on mass loss (Schroder and Smith, 2008) and the principle of conservation of angular momentum. The potentially sustainable objects’ temperatures are solved for using blackbody equations, from which comparison of RMS gas speed with escape velocity determines the ability of a body to retain an atmosphere consisting of a specific gas. It is found that Earth and Mars are optimal SSOs in stage 1. In stages 2 and 3, Triton is most sustainable, but in stage 4, the Galilean moons and Titan appear to be more habitable. Stage 5 has Triton being the most optimal... Read more...
My project began on my flight from Long Island, New York to Northfield, Minnesota. I have always been a highly curious person, drawn to new knowledge and understanding of any topic. Yet, as I sat on that plane, beginning to read about the latest research in the behavioral biology of baboons, I did not realize Primatology would become a passion . . . At the Carleton College Summer Science Program I studied under Professor Annie Bosacker . . . Through Dr. Bosacker I was given access to an extensive data set, entitled GomDem04, collected for over forty years at Gombe National Park, Tanzania. This data set represented the demography of hundreds of wild olive baboons from various different troops that inhabit Gombe National Park. It provided essential information such as the name, birth date, number in birth order, sex, age at death, and mother’s name and age for each baboon. At first, the data sheet appeared to be an enormous, overwhelming mass of numbers and empirical information on thousands of baboons, without much study on their actual behavior. I could not see how I would be able to conduct a research project on behavioral biology through analyzing a set of numbers. Yet, through Dr. Bosacker’s vast knowledge of the topic and entertaining stories about her time at Gombe National Park, Tanzania, she brought the data to life... Read more...
Cold Fusion has been an active research field in the quest for next-generation energy. In Andrei Lipson’s CR-39 experiments, oscillating deuterium atoms or other particles were accelerated (collective acceleration effect) through an electric field and collided with each other to undergo fusion. Another procedure conducted by Roussetski involved the bombardment of TiD2 with a Deuteron beam. In all these scenarios of fusion research, a significant bottleneck is the detection of reactant molecules. The application of CR-39 plastic track detectors in cold fusion experiments is vital to detecting and identifying different particles and background/foreground separation.The current method of gathering data from CR-39 tracks is to use an electron microscope to dissect each individual crater in the x-y and z planes. There has been no way to analyze large amounts of CR-39 data in a reasonable time frame. In this research, we study 3D trace data from nuclear particle impacts upon CR-39 detectors to identify craters made by particles. We utilize a new process, confocal microscopy, to gather numerical trace data from the polycarbonate. We propose and apply new approaches for detecting and computing several main characteristics, such as depth and incident angle, of the impact of the particle. Our approach and related code serves as a tool for automatically classifying the craters and matching them to known collision types and corresponding particles, therefore enabling the efficient and accurate processing of large quantities of CR-39 data... Read more...
My parents, both Chinese citizens at the time, came to the United States in the late 80’s to attend graduate school. Later on, my mom got a job offer and they moved to the town I was born and raised in, a small town in North Dakota by the name of Grand Forks. We have been here since then. The Red River of the North runs through Grand Forks, and one summer, I was deemed old enough to ride my bike down to the river so that I could explore. It was then that I found the tubes. Big cement tubes. And there was something coming out of them. And whatever that something was, it was draining into my river. When I asked, I was told that those tubes were pipes that drained runoff water from the city to the river. That answered some of my questions, but not all. And later that winter when I found out about Science Fair, I knew what my project was going to be. That was the year of 2005. For the next four years, I studied river water quality and the river surroundings. A local research center supported my studies by providing the sampling devices and lab facilities that I needed for my project. My first two water quality science projects focused on the long term behavior of common water quality parameters such as pH, turbidity, and the levels of dissolved oxygen and ions. The latter two projects that I conducted focused more on the interaction between the city and the river in terms of how we may be polluting our water sources in ways we don’t realize... Read more...
Mathematics has always been important to me. When I was little, I liked to do mathematical puzzles out of a book I had bought from a catalog. I would think and ponder about these puzzles and discuss them with my family and friends. The answers were not straightforward, and I found the solutions interesting to read. Doing the puzzles, I discovered that mathematics is more than just a set of drills to memorize. It is a subject full of interesting, clever ideas . . . Gradually, I became more interested in proof-based mathematics, so I pursued it further in a research internship at CSULB. My mentor, Dr. Wen-Qing Xu, had published several articles in the field of error-correction coding theory. Since that field of mathematics does not require the use of calculus and other collegiate mathematical preparations, but it does involve serious mathematical arguments, so I decided to pursue research in this area. I studied the separation of symbols on two-dimensional arrays, and came up with formulas for the maximum separating distance in various cases. I wrote proofs of my results, and spent many, many days discussing them with my mentor and revising them over and over again. It was intense, grueling work, but in the end it paid off... Read more...
University of Chicago
Professor David Mazziotti
Editor