#science competition

[spikyseasponge]

morphology of zygaena - francisco martinez clavel

[i-rationality]

Mathematical Olympiad Journey

The end of an era ;-;

I’m actually quite sad it’s over, the shot that I move on to the next phase is kind of slim but I honestly had so much fun and feel so proud of myself.

The olympiads used to be a very big source of anxiety, I had one of the worst panic attacks of my life doing an olympiad exam, I completely froze up, barely wrote anything on the page. I had to go to therapy because I have anxiety not only socially but also in terms of putting huge pressure on myself academically, associating my worth to my accomplishments.

The fact that I walked in there and, not only did I not freeze but I also, calmed myself down by doing the breathing exercises my therapist taught me and managed to answer most of the questions is absolutely astonishing. Remember to celebrate these types of accomplishments! Celebrate your bravery, celebrate your growth! 

Now I’m going to tell you what I did the morning before and what I did during the exam + “my regrets”:

10/11/2021

 - morning:

In the morning before I looked through some exercises I had gotten wrong, the ones I wasn’t able to look over before and saw what the problems were. I especially payed attention to where I felt the least secure over my knowledge. This wasn’t a very loaded effort, it was a very soft revision. After that I just rested and did some brething exercises here and there, when I could feel my anxiety creeping in. Also cleaned up my room and stuff, you know just activities to take my mind off of it.

I was priviledged enough to have friends go with me and their mere presence made it all a lot more wholesome and less pressuring, it definitely added perspective.

 - exam:

During the exam I’d say the only thing I would’ve changed was having different perspectives on the exercises. It is easy in exams like this to focus immediately on the details without looking at the bigger picture first. So yea, if I could rectify something I’d tell a few hours ago Inês to focus on the bigger picture first and then focus on the details!

 - after:

My biggest problem after the exam was really realizing some mistakes and realizing how a problem I wasn’t able to solve was supposed to be solved. It is very frustrating and can feel a bit depressing, knowing you could’ve done something and not having done it feels like shit. The answer is really stoicism lmao, don’t worry, or even care, about things you aren’t able to change. The person you are now isn’t the person who was solving that exam but I can absolutely tell you that both those people are doing their best, give yourself grace and empathy, there’s nothing you can do now.

11/11/2021

It was worth it, going in there and proving to myself that I put in the work to better my mental and can now see direct results of it. Proving to myself that I put in the work and developed some critical thinking/problem solving skills. Realizing things I could’ve done differently or more efficiently will be endlessly frustrating but it is so worth knowing I did my absolute best in those conditions and in those two hours.

It’s definitely the end of this series, I don’t know what other people answered and how well it went for them, I know it’s pretty likely a girl in grade 10 passes and I hope she does. Idk it’s just a reminder that passion for mathematics carries on existing and that there will always be kids who have this spirit within them. I hope she has a bright future, I bet she deserves it.

It would be a great feeling to pass and to write more of these posts, which is something I wasn’t expectting to miss as much, and to continue studying and feeling that euphoria of getting something particularly challenging correct.

I hope this encourages someone to try out for the olympiads, if you’re able to get over yourself and realize that this isn’t that big of a deal in the grand scope of things, I promise you will have a lot of fun and it will be an extremely rewarding experience.

Take care, remember to love freely.

[sciencenewsforstudents]

For teens, big problems may lead to meaningful research

Several teens who competed at the Regeneron Science Talent Search applied their STEM know-how to solve problems they or their communities faced.

Many people see a problem in the world and don’t know what to do. They might throw their hands up in the air — leaving it for someone else to find a solution. But few finalists of this year’s Regeneron Science Talent Search feel this way. They let personal or social problems inspire their research.

Established in 1942, the Regeneron Science Talent Search, or STS, is the nation’s oldest and most prestigious science and math competition. Each year, it brings together 40 high school seniors from around the United States. They compete for awards now valued at more than $1.8 million. In response to the pandemic, this year’s competition is being held online.

And for many of its finalists, their research project this year wasn’t just a competition entry. It was a way help others.

Explainer: Hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons

Take Andrew Brinton. He was 10 years old when Hurricane Sandy battered the U.S. East Coast in 2012. From his home in Merrick, N.Y., the boy experienced the storm firsthand. “I looked out the window and I saw a car floating down the street,” recalls Andrew, now 17. He found it “really scary.” Soon, he was researching hurricanes. He learned about damage caused by storm surges — when winds push water ashore. He also learned how salt marshes can protect inland communities by buffering those waves. These “living shorelines” ended up fascinating Andrew.

He started mucking about in Long Island’s salt marshes. “I was walking across …  places that nobody had been for more than 60 years,” he says. Andrew noticed a buildup of certain mussels, a type of mollusk, in very grassy areas. Scientists have linked the health of marsh grasses to the ability of shorelines to absorb the energy of waves. Andrew became curious: Could those grasses and mussels work together as partners in that energy absorption?

To test the idea, he surveyed mussels at 10 marshy areas using a grid that he toted from site to site. He’d take a picture and count the mussels in each place. At healthy sites, he found that grass and an abundance of mussels often occur together. This may be because the grass creates a safe haven for the mussels. At the same time, he says, mussels provide nutrients that help the grasses grow. His data now suggest that mussels and grasses together help restore marshes that can protect coastal communities.

[eolian-234]

The Supplejack

Summary: Peter Parker has been alone his whole freshman year but finds hope when Stark Industries announces a science competition. The prize? An internship with Tony Stark.

AO3

Fanfiction 

Chapters:  One - Two - Three - Four - Five - Six - Seven - Eight - Nine - Ten - Eleven - Twelve - Thirteen - Fourteen - Fifteen - Sixteen - Seventeen - Eighteen - Nineteen -  

[sciencenewsforstudents]

Musicians could benefit from teens’ research that pictures sound

While in middle school, Hannah Shu and Isabelle Katz developed ways to picture musical tones. Their research could help everyone from instrument shoppers to vocal coaches.

Washington, D.C. — The human ear is an amazing sensor. It can detect a wide range of sounds. But it often can’t discern subtle differences between similar tones. Nor can the human brain “record” sounds for playback and analysis. Such abilities could help shoppers looking for a good musical instrument. They also could aid vocal coaches. Now, two teens are turning to technology to tackle such acoustic challenges.

Isabelle Katz, 15, lives in Moraga, Calif. Hannah Shu, 14, resides in Seaside, Calif. Each had a science-fair project last year that performed detailed mathematical analyses of musical tones, among other things. These projects qualified each teen to become a finalist, late last month, in the ninth annual Broadcom MASTERS competition.

MASTERS stands for Math, Applied Science, Technology and Engineering for Rising Stars. Open to U.S. middle-school researchers, this program was created by Society for Science & the Public. (The Society also publishes Science News for Students.) Broadcom Foundation, headquartered in Irvine, Calif., sponsors the event.

Both Isabelle’s and Hannah’s projects were impressive. After all, each allowed the girls to make it through a screening process that knocked out at least 2,200 other applicants.

A sound analysis

Hannah has played the violin since she was eight. For her project, she asked a simple question: Does a high-cost violin produce better music then an inexpensive one? To answer that, she turned to math. She used it to compare the tones produced by different instruments.

Hannah Shu, 14, of Seaside, Calif., came up with a way to analyze and display musical tones. Her technique could help violin shoppers distinguish good from not-so-good instruments.

CREDIT: Linda Doane/Society for Science & the Public

The teen recorded the same notes on her smartphone as she played them on different violins. Computer software then converted those recorded sounds into graphs. (This is the same sort of software that scientists use to analyze the songs of birds and whales, Hannah notes.) In her graphs, powerful pitch frequencies showed up in bright yellow. The software depicted less-powerful ones in a subdued purple. Hannah used these graphs to assess each violin’s overall sound quality.

In theory, a musical note has a single frequency. But in practice, that’s not true, Hannah points out. Stringed instruments, such as violins, produce “notes” that contain a range of frequencies, she explains. The dominant tone should be what’s called its fundamental frequency. That’s the sound a string makes as it vibrates back and forth as a single unit. Higher-frequency components of a string’s movements create what are called overtones. They develop when a string vibrates back and forth in a wave-shaped manner. The larger the number of waves there are between one end of the string and the other, the higher the frequency of that particular overtone.

In general, a musical tone is pleasing if the fundamental frequency is louder than its overtones. But poor-quality instruments don’t always produce such tones, says Hannah. The fundamental may be only slightly louder than its overtone. And in some, the overtones can dominate.

On average, each of the eight most expensive violins that Hannah tested cost more than $8,000. The cheapest 16 averaged just a bit more than $1,250 each. Maybe it’s no surprise, but the costliest instruments tended to produce better tones, Hannah found. Yet some low-cost instruments sounded nearly as good as the pricey violins.

By recording musical notes and making them visible, Hannah Shu could easily tell a good violin (which produced notes with strong fundamentals [bright bars], upper image) from a bad one that produced weak fundamentals (dim bars at right, lower image).

CREDIT: Linda Doane/Society for Science & the Public

She now suggests that the type of analyses she did might help violin shopper identify a bargain — or avoid a dud.

Sonic bull’s-eye

When expert musicians refer to musical tones, they often use words like “fat,” “bright” or “mellow.” A bit vague, these terms could mean different things to different people, says Isabelle. Non-experts, especially, might become confused. So Isabelle decided to describe and clearly depict musical tones mathematically. That should provide data that would be equally useful to all.

As Hannah did, Isabelle recorded and analyzed the musical tones produced by stringed instruments. But unlike Hannah, Isabelle used pianos — three brands of them.

She started by analyzing 10 different recordings of the so-called middle C note from each instrument. It has a fundamental frequency of about 261 hertz. (One hertz is the same as 1 cycle, or vibration, per second.) For each brand, she calculated the average intensity, or volume, of the middle C’s fundamental tone. She did the same for each of that note’s first six overtones. Then, she graphed the seven frequencies for each brand of piano.

To make these graphs easier to compare, she adjusted each so that the loudest fundamental or overtone had a value of 1.

Each brand of piano, she showed, had a different balance of frequencies. Isabelle decided to depict her frequency maps using rings of different colors. The resulting maps looked a bit like an archer’s target. The blue center of the bull’s-eye represented the fundamental frequency. Just outside was a green ring. It depicted the first overtone. Outside of that ring were rings of (in order) yellow, orange, purple, black and dark green. The width of each ring related to the volume of that overtone.

Isabelle Katz, 15, of Moraga, Calif., developed an alternative way to analyze and display musical notes. Her’s could help vocal coaches as well as instrument owners who want to evaluate sound quality.

CREDIT: Linda Doane/Society for Science & the Public

Such maps offer a type of “fingerprint” of the note for that instrument. These could be used to tell one brand of piano from another. And with just a little practice, Isabelle says, someone could learn to read such a graph and interpret a note’s balance of frequencies.

Her colorful bull’s-eyes could find many uses. For instance, they could be one way to monitor a piano’s tones over time. Indeed, big changes in a note’s fingerprint might signal it’s time to tune the instrument.

Vocal coaches might find these maps useful, too. They could record a student’s voice and then display its mix of frequencies. The coach could then compare that fingerprint to an ideal mix of frequencies for that note as sung by experts. Over time, a coach — or student — could monitor how a fingerprint changed and potentially improved.

Isabelle hopes to one day develop a phone-based app based on her technique. She also wants to file a patent on it, form a company and (maybe most of all) find investors who can help her develop her ideas further. For now, once she’s developed her app she’ll test it out on members of the choir in which she sings.

A sound reward

STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. For her qualifying project, Isabelle nabbed the $2,500 second-place award in the Mathematics category at Broadcom MASTERS.

In most student science competitions, the majority of the finalists’ scores is based on their qualifying science-fair projects. That’s different from how it works at Broadcom MASTERS. Here, roughly four-fifths of the finalists’ scores are based on the creativity and teamwork they show in helping to solve on-the-spot research challenges.

[sciencenewsforstudents]

Leftover opioids? Teen finds possible way to kill such pills

Mercedes Randhahn, 14, of Ogden, Utah, came up with a possible way to chemically deactivate unused opioid pills. Her research paved the way to a $2,500 prize.

Washington, D.C. — Opioids are powerful and addictive painkillers. Sometimes patients don’t need to take all of the pills they were prescribed. If such leftovers make it into the wrong hands, dangerous problems could ensue. So 14-year-old Mercedes Randhahn of Ogden, Utah, looked for — and may have found — a way to chemically deactivate unused opioids.

That feat qualified the teen to compete here, late last month, in the ninth annual Broadcom MASTERS competition. In fact, her work was so impressive it helped earn her a $2,500 award at the event.

MASTERS stands for Math, Applied Science, Technology and Engineering for Rising Stars. This program for middle-school researchers was created by Society for Science & the Public (which publishes Science News for Students). Broadcom Foundation, headquartered in Irvine, Calif., sponsors the event. It brings together 30 finalists each year to tackle team challenges. This year, Mercedes was one of them.

Why kill pills?

Unused prescription medicines can be a big problem, especially if they are dangerous and addictive, as opioids are. If such pills aren’t stored safely, someone could get hold of them and accidentally overdose. Unused pills might even be a tempting target for thieves, says Mercedes.

Some law-enforcement agencies provide a safe place to drop off unused pills. Some pharmacies do too. But a lot of people might find that inconvenient, notes the teen, now a ninth-grader. She wanted to make it much easier for people at home to render such pills harmless. And chemistry, she suspected, offered a way to do that. The girl explored this idea in a science fair project last year.

Mercedes Randhahn, 14, of Ogden, Utah, worked with caffeine as a stand-in for opioid drugs. Her research tested a strategy to chemically deactivate leftover pills, rendering them harmless.

CREDIT: Linda Doane/Society for Science & the Public

Mercedes faced many challenges. Chief among them: She was too young to legally obtain and experiment with opioids. So she needed a stand-in. Opioid drugs are part of a group of chemicals called alkaloids, she found. When these substances react with acidic compounds, they can make relatively harmless salts.

Morphine and cocaine are alkaloids. But they, too, are addictive and illegal for teen testing. Mercedes ended up working with another alkaloid: caffeine. It’s far less toxic.

Next step: Mercedes scouted for an acid that would be safe to use — and commonly found around the house. She chose vinegar. (That liquid, often used in cooking and cleaning, is a very diluted solution of acetic acid.)

The teen mixed caffeine and vinegar, then added activated carbon. That last substance has large numbers of tiny pores in it where chemical reactions can take place. Those pores also can hold molecules once they’ve formed. Her hypothesis was that the vinegar and caffeine would react inside those pores. The resulting salt molecules would then remain locked in those pores. That should prevent the caffeine from being reactivated, she says.

Mercedes chemically analysed her caffeine-vinegar-carbon mix and then compared it to caffeine alone. She also compared the solution to a mix of just vinegar and carbon — no caffeine. The vinegar reactions indeed deactivated the caffeine, she found. The teen now suspects a similar technique might do the same to opioids.

Good work rewarded

STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. Broadcom MASTERS awards first- and second-place prizes in each of these categories. For her qualifying project, Mercedes nabbed the $2,500 second-place award in Engineering.

In most student-science competitions, the majority of a finalist’s score is based on a qualifying entry project. Broadcom MASTERS doesn’t work that way. Roughly four-fifths of the finalists’ scores are based on the creativity and teamwork each showed in helping solve on-the-spot research challenges.

[sciencenewsforstudents]

Teen auto-safety researcher nabs $25,000 science fair prize

Alaina Gassler took home the $25,000 top prize at the Broadcom MASTERS teen science competition. Her qualifying project could boost vehicle safety by eliminating blind spots for car drivers.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — On a weekend where the nation’s capital was focused on hosting its first World Series games in seven decades, 30 young researchers from across the nation were on deck for a hard-hitting competition of their own. In a sense, all were winners already. Each had, after all, beat out hundreds of others for the chance to face off in team play. But only one contestant — Alaina Gassler, 14 — would take home the top prize: an educational award worth $25,000. Her award was one of more than a dozen announced at an evening gala on October 29.

Alaina was one of 30 finalists from 13 states who competed in the ninth annual Broadcom MASTERS competition. MASTERS stands for Math, Applied Science, Technology and Engineering for Rising Stars. The program was created by Society for Science & the Public, which publishes Science News for Students.

Alaina and the other finalists had to be in sixth, seventh or eighth grade when they competed in a local or regional science fair. To qualify for Broadcom MASTERS, their research had to have been judged within the top 10 percent of all projects at that fair. Those projects all fell within the fields of science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM). Alaina had developed a novel system aimed at boosting auto safety.

But those qualifying projects would only account for 20 percent or so of a finalist’s score at this week’s event. The rest of the score would come from how an individual was judged while working within one of the six teams to solve a spectrum of assigned, on-the-spot science and engineering challenges.

“Congratulations to Alaina, whose project has the potential to decrease the number of automobile accidents by reducing blind spots,” says Maya Ajmera. She is president of Society for Science and the Public.

Alaina goes to school in West Grove, Penn. “I didn’t think I’d win an award this big,” she enthused at the gala. “I was happy just getting the small medal that everyone got at the beginning of the night!” she added.

The Samueli Foundation provided Alaina’s winnings. This non-profit organization was created by Broadcom founder Henry Samueli and is based in Newport Beach, Calif.

Fifteen of the finalists took home major awards or the funds to attend a science camp of their choice. For the first time, this year, 60 percent of the finalists were female.

[sciencenewsforstudents]

What is trendy in today’s science fair projects?

Over the past 10 years, behavioral and social sciences have dominated submissions to the Regeneron Science Talent Search.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — When most people consider a science fair, they might think of baking soda volcanoes and model rockets. But these days, you’re far more likely to find new smartphone apps and computer programs. What’s hot and what’s not? We decided to crunch the data from the past 10 years of the Regeneron Science Talent Search to find out. It turns out that the key to finding a science fair project is sticking close to home.

The Science Talent Search, or STS, is arguably the premier U.S. science competition for high school students. And it has been almost since its founding in 1942 by Society for Science and the Public. (STS is now sponsored by Regeneron, a company that makes medications to treat diseases such as asthma and cancer.) Any U.S. high school senior can apply to STS. This year, nearly 2,000 did. Among the many items that entrants had to submit to qualify was a science-research project.

But there wasn’t a baking soda volcano in the bunch. Science has changed a lot in the last 77 years. We’ve gone from the space race and landing an astronaut on the moon to mapping the DNA blueprint of our species and many others. In the last 10 years, smartphones have put a camera and computer in nearly everyone’s hands. A simple home computer can now analyze big data from exoplanets millions of light-years away.

And as science changes, science projects may, too. When it comes to the STS candidates, which topics have proven most popular? Science News for Students is run by the same organization as STS. So to answer this question, we dug into 10 years of data and almost 20,000 project submissions. The results have been graphed here.

Not surprisingly, the data show that the popularity of topics can shift widely over time.

Teens choose which category their project falls under, explains Alison Hewlett Stifel. She directs the competition. What topic they choose determines the type of scientist who will end up seeing their application first.