Newtown Students Win Top Honors

At State Science Fair

By Martha Coville

Two top science students in Newtown schools participate in sophisticated research to help stop the global climate crisis. And a third professes interest in another question consuming the interests of 21st Century scientists: the inner workings of the human brain.

Last month, Newtown High School senior Dayton Horvath won second place in the Connecticut State Science Fair for developing a method to recycle carbon dioxide. St Rose of Lima eighth grader Matt Ryan won third place among eighth graders. Matt wondered if the average Connecticut family could use algae, in a backyard pond, to generate enough ethanol to meet their energy needs.

Finally, a second NHS senior, Rebecca Reed, was named a finalist at the science fair for her research into the brain’s neural networks. For her project, in robotics, Rebecca wired a synthetic arm to react to variations in temperature.

 

Solving ‘Some Of The Problems We Have’

Rebecca’s interest in neural networks is not new. Last year, she won several prizes at the Connecticut Science Fair for a linguistics project involving neural networks. “I’m really interested in languages,” said Rebecca, who studies Latin and French at NHS. She is also taking a course in Mandarin at Yale University.

“This project was with neural networks, again, but with robotics, not linguists,” she said. “It was about limbs. I got samples of a polymer from the University of Maine, and coated them with metal, to simulate an artificial muscle.” Rebecca said she also found a software program modeling how the brain’s neural network’s function.

She installed a sensor on the prosthetic limb, and connected it to the computer. “I defined 15 to 35 degrees Celsius as a normal temperature range,” she said. “Temperatures below that were too cold, and temperatures between 40 and 50 degrees Celsius were too hot. If the temperatures were too hot, or too cold,” she continued, “the muscle moved.”

Rebecca also said she would like to continue researching neural networks and robotics in college. “I’d like to try different types of sensors with the limb,” she said.

Rebecca’s classmate Dayton did not provide The Bee with detailed information about his method of recycling carbon dioxide into methanol. However, his mother, Maria Horvath, said his younger brother Tarren shares his interest in developing new technologies to limit the impact of global warming. Tarren was a finalist the Connecticut’s regional Science Horizons fair, for a project titled “Vehicle Emissions Dissipation over Distance.” “Hopefully people like them can help solve some of this problems we have,” Ms Horvath said.

Finally, Matt Ryan, who attends St Rose School, said of his project, “I wanted to see if an average Connecticut family could grow algae in a pond and sustain their own energy needs. At the gas station, the prices are always rising,” he said, “and scientists are starting to look at that. I wanted to see if the average Connecticut family could make ethanol from algae so they wouldn’t have to fill up their cars at the pump.”

Matt discovered is project was feasible, but not particularly practical. “Theoretically, it could be done, but only if you had a 27-acre pond,” he said. But, he said, “lots Newtown families could do a half acre or an acre pond,” which would, at least, offset some of their energy costs.