Freshman's nuclear fusion reactor has USU physics faculty in awe

LOGAN — A widespread belief among physicists nowadays is that modern science requires squadrons of scientists and wildly expensive equipment.
    Craig Wallace and Philo T. Farnsworth are putting the lie to all that.
    Wallace, a baby-faced tennis player fresh out of Spanish Fork High School, had almost the entire physics faculty of Utah State University hovering (and arguing) over an apparatus he had cobbled together from parts salvaged from junk yards and charity drops.
    The apparatus is nothing less than the sine qua non of modern science: a nuclear fusion reactor, based on the plans of Utah's own Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of television.
    The reactor sat on a table with an attached vacuum pump wheezing away. A television monitor showed what was inside: a glowing ball of gas surrounded by a metal helix.
    The ball is, literally, a small sun, where an electric field forces deuteron ions (a form of hydrogen) to gather, bang together and occasionally fuse, spitting out a neutron each time fusion occurs.
    "Here I am with this thing here," Wallace mused, looking at his surroundings. "Who'da thought?"
    Wallace and Farnsworth are much alike. Both are (or were — Farnsworth died in 1971) tinkerers. While Wallace was in grade school, his mother got a flat tire while he was riding with her. He fixed it. For his part, Farnsworth began improvising electric motors at a young age. Both went on to bigger and better things.
    "He was never motivated to take science," said Wallace's father, Allen Wallace. "It was really the tinkering that motivated him."
    When Craig was a sophomore in high school, browsing the Internet he discovered that Farnsworth had come up with a way to create deuteron ion plasma, a prerequisite to fusion.
    While it was not good for production of energy (the source of much embarrassment to the University of Utah in the cold fusion debacle in the late 1980s), Farnsworth's design did emit neutrons, a useful tool for commercial applications and scientific experimentation.
    "He (Farnsworth) was after the Holy Grail of excess energy, but everyone agrees that it's mostly useful as a neutron generator," Allen Wallace said.
    About 30 such devices exist around the country, owned by such entities as Los Alamos National Laboratories, NASA and universities. ("I bet I'm the only high school student that has one," Craig Wallace said.)
    Looking at Farnsworth's plans for the first time, Craig and his father both had the same thought: Now there's a science project.
    They set to work. They found a neutron detector in an Idaho Falls scrap metal yard. Craig built a neutron modulator (which slows down the emitted neutrons so they can be detected) out of a few hundred spare CDs. They found a broken turbo molecular pump lying forgotten at Deseret Industries.
    Too poor to buy pricey deuterium gas, Craig bought a container of deuterium oxide, or heavy water, for 20 bucks and came up with a way to make it a gas and get rid of the accompanying oxygen by passing it over heated magnesium filings.
    Not bad for a backyard amateur who considered himself more mechanic than scientist.
    "I teased him that he was now officially a science geek," Allen Wallace said.
    One professor Friday stood nervously away from Wallace's reactor — which is notably free from any shielding — but he needn't have worried: Wallace's detector measures 36 neutrons per minute just in background radiation from space, and the device's usual output adds only four neutrons per minute. People in airplanes absorb much more than that.
    It took two years of gathering materials and six months of assembly, but the final product actually, incongruously, works.
    "(This was) the day I achieved a Poisser plasma reaction," Wallace wrote next to a picture of the glowing ball. "Probably the coolest thing I have ever seen."
    Others thought it was cool, too. Wallace began winning contests — local, state, national — culminating in second place in the International Intel Science and Engineering Fair last May in Cleveland. He's now beginning work on a USU physics degree.
    "The whole thing combines chemistry, engineering, physics," he said. "Put them all together and you come out with something pretty sweet."
    Farnsworth would have been proud.

I laughed too ... till I found out what Jennifer D'Ascoli's blueberry project actually involved:

From The Evangelist website:

SCIENCE

High school student wins for anti-cancer research

BY KAREN DIETLEIN
STAFF WRITER

It began when Jennifer D'Ascoli discovered the posibilities wrapped up in a common, succulent fruit found in muffins, pies, pastries and fruit salads: the blueberry.

While looking into cancer-fighting techniques to study for her junior-year science research project, the senior at the Academy of the Holy Names in Albany stumbled on promising anti-cancer research regarding flavonoids. Those are natural compounds found in ordinary fruits and vegetables, such as soy, cranberries and blueberries.

Her interest was sparked by research that noted that populations in Asia that incorporate cooked or fried soy products -- tofu, for example -- into their daily diet have a lower frequency of breast and prostate cancer.

Inquiring mind

"I wanted to see if the molecular structure of the flavonoids changed when cooked -- and if the new molecular structure would be what is helping to prevent the cancer," Jennifer told The Evangelist.

The project looked at two flavonoids in particular: naringenin, found in blueberries, and genistein, found in soy. She found not only that cooking both products not only changed their physical features -- for example, blueberries shift from a yellow-green color to a purple-red hue when cooked -- but also that the compound's basic molecular structure was changed.

"There is a definite molecular structure change," she said firmly, "and I believe that it helps fight cancer."

Thrills of science

Jennifer, a member of St. Helen's parish in Niskayuna, is excited by scientific research, especially in interdisciplinary fields, about subjects that might not be readily apparent or subjects masked behind the ordinary.

She thrills to results, loves to see change occur in her experiments and thrives on the hands-on involvement of work in the laboratory.

Much more boring -- but very necessary, she affirmed -- are the hours of research and data analysis that follows any lab work.

"I'll be trapped in the science library for hours at a time, trying to figure out what something means," she said. "I feel like -- 'Ugh! I need to get away from the books! Let me take some measurements!'"

Pay-off

But there are rewards for persistence: For her blueberry study, she won the $3,000 First Grand Award in Physics at the 2003 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Cleveland, Ohio.

She almost didn't make it to the pre-college competition, which invited 1,350 contestants from 35 countries. Her project won third place at the Greater Capital Region Science and Engineering Fair, and only the first two winners go. But she was offered the chance when the first-place winner decided not to attend.

Jennifer decided to take the week at a relaxed pace and to cut down on the stress that invariably crops up while defending research. Instead of stressing over notes and speeches, she tried to connect with other young people interested in science and technology. She went out to breakfast with Texas teens, for example, spoke with a contingent from Italy and talked shop with those whose projects were set up around her between judging sessions.

"I was there to have fun," she said. "I didn't expect to be winning anything."

More to come

Jennifer has big plans for the future of her project. Although researchers don't currently have a set method for making flavonoids into a anti-cancer drug or treatment, she believes the potential is there.

"It's a really great thing that we could have this natural way to fight cancer," she explained. "We could step away from chemotherapy and try to treat cancer with flavonoids. They're already in fruits and vegetables, things we can relate to."

To prove that, however, she has much more work to do, such as testing heated and unheated flavonoids on different cancer strains.

And there's no shortage in subject material for testing. According to Jennifer, there are more than 4,000 known flavonoids, in food both ordinary and exotic. She hopes to conduct research on those substances next year.

"Nobody really knows how they work right now," she said. "But I want to find out what is making them fight cancer so well."

(Jennifer knows more than science. This school year, she will edit the school's literary magazine, audition for the fall play and serve as a co-captain for the mock trial team.)

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