These Teenage Scientists Can Wow You

Name: Patrick Jeffrey Abejar
Age: 17
School: Smithtown High School West in Smithtown, N.Y.
Subject: Climate Change

Do you believe in climate change? That was the question Abejar heard quite a lot of in the summer of 2008, when he was doing research at Stony Brook University in New York. So he decided to figure out a way to quantify whether our Earth’s climate has changed over time.

"When I get confronted with a question like that, I don’t want to just read articles without getting some hands-on feel for the subject matter," Abejar said.

He formed his researche based on prior studies showing that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere can affect the Ph in seawater, which in turn affects the ratio of boron 10 and 11. In fact, these changes can be found in fossil records. So Abejar decided to see how the boron isotope ratio in the shells of brachiopod, Neospirifer, had changed over time. He specifically wanted to test brachiopod samples from the late Pennsylvanian and early Permian periods (306 to 298 million years ago), because other research has shown those times to be marked by rapid decrease and then increase in global temperatures.

Using shells from the Peabody Museum at Yale University, Abejar first performed two tests to select those that were in good physical shape and hadn’t been contaminated by chemical elements that shouldn’t exist in those samples, such as manganese. The he used a drill commonly found in a dentist’s office to retrieve powdery samples from the shells.

He then added hydrochloric acid to the samples and ran them in a mass spectrometer to determine the boron isotope ratio. What Abejar confirmed was that the boron ratio in the shells increased when the global temperatures declined, and vice versa.

"What I did was to establish that boron is an ideal tracer for climate change," Abejar said. "In a modern day context, we don’t have to use the brachiopod. We can collect seawater directly and observe the boron ratio for additional proof that we do have global warming."

Name: Aniruddha Sandeep Deshmukh
Age: 17
School: Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose, Calif.
Subject: Ecosystem Preservation

Wildfires are common occurrences in California. They sometimes create room for invasive grasses to take hold when native species aren’t able to grow back quickly. After reading a research report that shows a connection between a build-up of cyanide, which occurs after a fire, and the difficulty of native plants to re-grow, Deshmukh set out to analyze cyanide content in post-fire soils and figure out how to lower cyanide’s concentration.

He picked the sagebrush Artemisia californica as well as five other plant species that are part of the coastal sage scrub ecosystem. The ecosystem has shrunk by 70 percent over the past 20 years, Deshmukh noted.

Dicobalt edentate has been shown to be effective in treating cyanide poisoning. And Deshmukh found the compound to work well in binding cyanide in the soil and preventing it from accumulating.