Sara Volz of Colorado Springs, Colo., won the Intel Science Talent Search, the nation’s most prestigious high school science competition, for her experiments with algae as a biofuel and will take home a prize of $100,000. Other finalists from among the other 39 high school finalists won prizes totaling $530,000.
Algae is a promising biofuel but still quite costly to produce. Volz (shown above, center) used artificial selection to create populations of algae cells with high oil content to produce a more economically feasible biofuel. And memorably, she cultivated the algae under her loft bed.
Second prize, worth $75,000, went to Jonah Kallenbach (above, left), 17, of Ambler, Pa., whose project in bioinformatics could lead to new treatments for diseases such as breast cancer, ovarian cancer and tuberculosis.
smartplanet.com»
Algae is a promising biofuel but still quite costly to produce. Volz (shown above, center) used artificial selection to create populations of algae cells with high oil content to produce a more economically feasible biofuel. And memorably, she cultivated the algae under her loft bed.
Second prize, worth $75,000, went to Jonah Kallenbach (above, left), 17, of Ambler, Pa., whose project in bioinformatics could lead to new treatments for diseases such as breast cancer, ovarian cancer and tuberculosis.
smartplanet.com»