Senior earns trip to Los Angeles for science fair
Niskayuna High School senior Ethan Strayer used science to get him an all-expenses paid trip to Los Angeles.
Five Niskayuna High School students competed in the 21st Annual Greater Capital Region Science and Engineering Fair on March 26 and they all received awards for their research projects, which ranged from water quality analysis to how to charge your portable media device on the go. Paul Scott teaches the research seminar course at the school, which is where the projects originated from for the fair. The students pick out a project and do independent research to reach a conclusion.
It is probably the class that best represents the kind of research that is done in science, said Scott.
Bibi Ahmad won the Walter Eppenstein Phycis Award, Bhavya Narala won the Stockholm Junior Water Prize, Strayer received the Stockholm Junior Water Prize and placed third overall in the competition, and Nathan Wieghman and Zackery Wistort won the Nuclear Society Award and the United States Navy and Marine Corps Award.
By placing third in the competition, Strayer received the paid trip to Los Angeles to participate in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.
`I have always been really passionate about water quality,` he said. `I wanted to do something more local and more impactful in my community, so I wanted to focus on fresh water monitoring.`
His project was a physical, chemical and biological assessment of the upper tributaries of the Alplaus Kill River. After hearing his teacher, Scott, was interested in a trout restocking process, he decided on his project’s focus.
`I wanted to see if the Alplaus Kill was suitable enough to support these populations, so his efforts in the future would not be for nothing,` Wistort said.
After doing his study he found out the river is suitable for the trout restocking project.
Narala, also a senior, also focused on water quality, but on from a different perspective. She looked at the effect of hospitals on waste water treatment plants.
`All of junior year I did a whole bunch of research on the effect of chemicals in our waste water and indirectly our drinking water,` she said.
There were five different compounds she focused on and she looked at five different waste water treatment plants, which included Niskayuna’s plant. The hospitals didn’t have as large of an effect on the water quality as she thought they would, but one plant was near a pharmaceutical plant and resulted in the most affected water.
`The site that had the highest concentration was the one with the pharmaceutical plant,` she said. `Oxycodone is actually found at really high concentrations at every single site it was off the scales compared to the other four.`
It might not be affecting people directly right now, but she said it could have an effect on aquatic animals, which could lead to a direct effect in the future.
If you are thinking about going outside this summer you might want to heed information Ahmad discovered with her research of the effect of SPF and application thickness of sunscreen.
`We use sunscreen to protect us from the UV rays that cause cancer, however sunscreen has self-contained chemicals that could be causing skin cancer,` she said.
Using a lower SPF sunscreen but applying it thicker proved just as effective as higher SPF sunscreens, which contain more of the chemicals possibly causing some skin cancer occurrences.
Enjoying the summer often means being outside, but Wiegman and Wistort developed a portable electronics solar charging device. The device did take some trial and error, but around the size of common tablet computer it provides on- the-go power.
`We decide to do a five- panel design to provide more energy output, so you could charge your device faster,` said Wistort.
Wiegman also tested it out in the field during a trip and it worked effectively with a decent amount of durability to the product. In a 4-hour period during peak sunlight the device was able to charge a smart phone to 75 percent power.
`Never without your iPod, even if you have to invent something,` joked Councilwoman Liz Orzel Kasper.“