Earlier this week The Discovery Channel handed out awards for its 2005 Discovery Young Scientist Challenge. Who took ‘America’s Top Young Scientist of the Year’ award? Meet Neela Thangada of San Antonio, TX. From Rediff.com:
Neela, of San Antonio, Texas, was adjudged ‘America’s Top Young Scientist of the Year’ — which carries a $20,000 scholarship - for her science project on plant cloning.…student of Keystone Junior High School, won the top prize for her science fair project titled ‘Effects of Various Nutrient Concentrations on the Cloning of the Eye of Solanum Tuberosum at Multiple Stages.’ Her skills of leadership, teamwork, scientific problem solving, critical thinking, and oral and written communication skills earned her the title of ‘America’s Top Young Scientist of the Year’, organisers say.
“I am very excited and happy to win this prize,” Neela told rediff India Abroad. “I did not expect to win, so it was a shock to me.” She said the contest is a great programme, which helps students get interested in science and take that interest to the next level. She plans to continue research at her high school, with the ultimate goal of becoming a professor of medicine.
Neela’s research was inspired by a biology textbook’s idea of a potato cloning experiment. She wanted to determine how different nutrient concentrations affected the multiple stages of growth in a potato. In her experiment, she removed 60 shoot tips from growing potatoes.
After sterilizing the tips, she excised the bottom two segments, and placed each in a test tube of half-strength or full-strength nutrient solution before incubating them.
Cloning? I don’t think they look favorably upon cloning in conservative Texas. It’s great to see that Indian parents are now allowing their kids aspire to be a professor of medicine and not just common doctors 
. Nine of the forty finalists were in fact of South Asian origin. Second place went to Nilesh Tripuraneni of Fresno, CA:
Nilesh had heard about hydrogen-powered cars but understood that producing hydrogen requires fossil fuels. He sought to find a more environmentally friendly approach through solar hydrogen production.
Nilesh built a solar-powered device that ran an electric current through a beaker full of saltwater. The result: electrolysis, by which water is split into hydrogen and oxygen. By clever manipulation of various gas laws, Nilesh measured the temperature, pressure, and volume of the hydrogen gas produced. He found that seawater produced almost as much hydrogen as solutions containing sulfuric acid or sodium hydroxide. [Link]
That there is an engineer in the making folks.
To conclude this week’s Science Friday I wanted to draw your attention to news reports of a study published in the Indian Journal Current Science.
SCIENTISTS in India say they have discovered two fossils fused together in sexual union for 65 million years.
It is the first time copulation has been discovered in a fossil state.
But voyeurs will need a microscope to view the eternal lovers.
The fossils are tiny swarm cells, a stage in the development of the fungus myxomycetes, also known as slime moulds. [Link]
Basically this is a very “ordinary” article about a fossilized slime mold. Can two cells fused together really be considered sex? There are countless examples of cell division in the fossil record. If you sex up a discovery however (pun intended), the media will jump all over it and put it out over the wire ahead of more groundbreaking work that doesn’t have “sex” in the title. This is an example of just how gullible the press and the public are about science. On the other hand, I now know how I want to go out. Yep, like that.
