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Saturday, March 20, 2010
Budding Scientists Show Off Research Projects at UNM
By John Fleck
Journal Staff Writer
That old story about determining the temperature by counting how fast a cricket chirps?
It checks out, according to Charlie Berger, a 15-year-old sophomore at St. Pius X High School. The warmer it is, the faster the crickets chirp, Berger found.
He also found that having a terrarium full of crickets in your lab, when your lab doubles as your bedroom, can be a bit annoying.
Berger's research was on display Friday at the University of New Mexico. It was among the work of more than 500 students from around the region at the Central New Mexico Science and Engineering Challenge, the competition formerly known as science fair.
The middle and high school students did science research projects and spent the day Friday explaining their work to judges.
Winners of scholarships and other prizes will be announced in awards ceremonies today at UNM.
Friday marked the return to Albuquerque of Erika DeBenedictis, an Albuquerque Academy senior who on Tuesday won the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search competition, which carries a $100,000 prize.
DeBenedictis, whose latest work involves a computer simulation of spacecraft orbits, began her science fair career as a seventh-grader at Our Lady of Fatima Catholic School, satisfying her curiosity about how snowflakes are formed. It was mandatory at the time, she explained, but her interest soon took off.
Science fair veteran Adi Denduluri, who competed in the Albuquerque fair in 2005 and returned this year to judge the competition, said the experience was critical to his later success. Denduluri attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and now works for a Silicon Valley technology firm.
"Science fair set me up," he said.
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