Three Awesome High School Science Projects

By the end of this video, one of these three high school seniors will be awarded two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for their original scientific research.

Now, the way this went down was, Regeneron, the sponsor of this video, invited me out to Washington DC for the awards gala of the Regeneron Science Talent Search. This is the nation's oldest and most prestigious science and math competition for high school seniors, founded and produced by Society for Science & the Public. Here, the 40 finalists were honored and the top 10 winners announced.

Now they couldn't tell me who was going to win because not even they knew beforehand, and that's because the students are judged not only on the strength of their projects but also on interviews where they are asked very challenging questions about a wide range of scientific topics. So I selected three students to follow and find out more about their projects. Just to be clear, these were not the top three place winners; they are students I picked in advance. But it just so happened that I picked the winner!

So, can you pick the winner? Let's meet the candidates. Ronak Roy redesigned the Phoroptor, that's the device used to determine eyeglass prescriptions. It contains dozens of precision glass lenses making it bulky, heavy, expensive, and a design that hasn't really changed in two hundred years.

"I wanted to make something that, you know, could fit the greater than half the Earth's population who, you know, can't just, you know, drive down to an optometrist office and just get a prescription," he explained.

"So can we see it?"

"Oh yeah, absolutely! So this is my child here! This is the portable Phoroptor. As you can see, it has the liquid lens that is actually the one responsible for replacing the dozens of precisely machine lenses here."

"So how does this liquid lens work?"

"Right. So it has a droplet of a polar substance like water and a droplet of a non-polar substance like a mineral oil. When you apply a voltage across it, the voltage will cause the polar substance to actually change its shape and go hug or repel the surfaces of the lens. So by changing the shape of the bubble, you change the way light refracts through it as it passes through those two glass windows, and therefore, you know, you're changing the focal length of the lens."

"You made an app?"

"Yeah, I did! So the screen you're looking at, which runs on an app on my smartphone, displays a test chart and runs an algorithm to actually do the refraction. I mean, those are pretty small letters! Those three static glass lenses are able to make it so the light coming from the phone is projected to a virtual distance of twenty feet. So it's basically simulating that test room, but you know, optically instead."

"So the way it works is there's an algorithm running on the smartphone app that generates pairs of lens voltages for the patient to compare, and in order to switch between the two lens voltages, the patient can click a button on a pair of headphones."

"So you can click once to toggle between the two, and once you've found which of the two is the best—"

"Okay, that's better! All right, so you can double click it, and it will indicate to the algorithm that it indeed is the best and generate the next pair."

"Yeah, I think it got worse."

"Yeah, um, so... and I'm gonna click?"

"Uh.. yeah."

"Okay, that's better, but it's not the best."

"I've seen the algorithm will basically cycle through this lens voltage pair generation process. This is like night and day. Like, it's not even a question until it zeros in on the one voltage that works the best for you."

"Okay, okay."

"Or... oh yes! Test complete!"

"All right awesome, would you like to know?"

"I would love to know what my eyesight is like!"

"All right, so I calculated negative 1.25 diopters, which is roughly in the range that most people with slight nearsightedness would have."

Ana Humphrey wanted to find hidden exoplanets with math. The Kepler space telescope has been the most prolific planet finder to date, detecting over 2,000 exoplanets by measuring a dip in their host star's brightness when they pass in front of it. But what happens if the planet passes just above or just below the star? Also, what if that planet is really small? Those little tiny shadows are really hard to pull out, and you've got a lot of noise.

A further challenge is that the Kepler mission only ran for four years. That means our absolute limit is it's really hard to find anything that takes longer than four years to orbit. To identify planets Kepler might have missed, Ana looked at existing multi-planetary systems and calculated whether additional planets could fit in between the ones we observed without disturbing their orbits.

"I imagine that you already have some sort of planets here, so we're going to call this planet X. So what are these two lines?"

"This line here is the same as this outer line—it's how close your imaginary planet can get to your outer planet—and this line here is your a-x-min, so it's how close your imaginary planet can get to your inner planet."

"So it's this line here. We have this region of stability given the extremes of where we can put a planet, and we have the maximum mass you can fit there. Anything in this area here, sort of shaded around our label, anything between these two graphs is a combination of a planet's mass and a location of the planet that we could fit in between the two we know about and maintain a stable system."

"Cool, yeah. Now the question everyone will ask you is, like, what's to say that this planet really exists as opposed to you just making up stuff?"

"So the assumption that I made going into my research was that systems are going to try to have as many planets packed in as possible. This is called the packed planetary system hypothesis. There are 560 locations where we could fit additional planets, so quite a few. How might we go about actually finding them?"

"One of the ways you could go about doing this is by doing something called folding the data. So let's say we figure out that a planet should have an orbital period of about one month; we have a year's worth of data, and we fold that data in twelve and get it to line up just right. We can get it so those transit signals actually layer on top of each other, and then we get a larger signal that, you know, we can find as opposed to the really small signals that sort of get lost in the noise."

"Do you want to introduce yourself? What's your name, what do you do?"

"Sure! Yeah. My name is Anjali Chadha. I am a senior at DuPont Manual High School in Louisville, Kentucky."

"What is... this?"

"That Anjali was concerned with dangerous contaminants in drinking water. This is a prototype of my arsenic sensor. So, you want to load a water sample right here in this compartment? The whole process starts with an automated chemical reaction, so there are a bunch of chemical reagents that sit in this compartment above the water sample. So the first reagent is tartaric acid, next is a combination of salts. It's called mono potassium sulfate, and the third is zinc."

"Arsenic is an element that's never found freely, but it's always bound to other elements. So basically that chemical reaction will help to free up all of the arsenic, and then the arsenic content changes into a gaseous form of arsine gas, and that's the best detectable form of arsenic basically."

"So what happens after that gas is formed is that there is a test strip, and it's covered in mercury bromide, which oxidizes in response to the arsenic and then changes color. So it's actually on a gradient scale. If there's very little arsenic content, then it just changes to a light color, and if there's a lot, it changes a dark color and everything in between."

"Right, so what I then did was write an image processing algorithm using some embedded electronic devices, specifically this device called an ArduCAM. It's just an embedded camera, and essentially the camera takes a picture of that test strip after it's changed color. It then pulls out all of the color values of the test strip and converts them into concentration data."

"So I wrote some mathematical models that kind of made that conversion, and then the last kind of piece of the puzzle is that there is this device—it's a microcontroller called a particle electron—and it's connected to this cellular antenna so that the data is instantaneously transmitted to the cloud. The real advantages of that is that several people would be able to access the data collected from one sensor, whether it's people in the same community who want to kind of have that information and knowledge about their water sources or whether it's people in research organizations who are trying to really learn more, learn what to test, learn what to improve, and what sites to really work on."

"So those are kind of the reasons why I chose to do that."

So now the moment of truth: which one of these high school students will win two hundred and fifty thousand dollars? Now I should point out that all 40 finalists each receive at least $25,000, the top ten receiving more than that. The first-place winner and recipient of a 250 thousand dollar award... from TC Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia: Ana Humphrey!

Congratulations to Ana Humphrey on winning this year's Regeneron Science Talent Search. If you know any bright American high school students, please consider sending them this video; it could be their turn next up on that stage. And if you are an American high school student, think about these numbers: around 3.6 million students graduate high school in the US each year, but only 2,000 or so applied to the Regeneron Science Talent Search. That means if you enter your science research project, you have a 1 in 50 shot of winning at least $25,000.

I mean, when else in high school do you get the opportunity to get such a financial boost and receive recognition for your ability in science and math? This opportunity could literally be life-changing. So take the next step, click the link in the description, and sign up to receive updates about the competition. Entries are open to all American high school seniors for next year, starting June 1st. And good luck!

Now, a little epilogue about Ana. You know, I asked her what inspired her to pursue this research in the first place, and she told me researchers at Caltech had predicted this ninth planet. Do you know what the researchers' names were? Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin. I always mess up his last name.

So I took her work and showed it to Konstantin Batygin. "When I first looked at this, I was blown away by the fact that this was a high school student."

"Right! I mean, this is done at the very least at the level of a senior undergraduate, maybe a graduate-level student! Right? I mean, it's a PhD level student!"

And finally, when I was watching the black hole press conference the other morning, we have seen and taken a picture of a black hole. Who should be in the audience asking a question? Ana Humphrey! It's like science is in her blood. I expect to see much more in the future from this very talented young scientist.

Congrats again, Ana!