#intelisef

[stanswyoungscientist]

After an amazing journey at #IntelISEF the STANSW Young Scientist team has landed back home. Thank you to all our supporters in getting the students to the point of representing the country, and to #Qantas for getting us home safely (at Sydney Kingsford Smith International Airport Arrivals Gate)

[wwsef]

#WWSEF is cheering on Adam Martinez as he travels to #INTELISEF in California to represent #TeamCanada this week ⚗️🔬youthscience.ca/news #cwsf2016 #cwsf #science #innovation

[soyarmenio]

Por primera vez Armenia acogerá la XXXIII Olimpiada Internacional de Biología (IBO 2022) en Tsaghkadzor, del 10 al 17 de julio de 2022 #Armenia #IntelISEF #IBO2020 https://soyarmenio.com/noticias-de-armenia/armenia-albergara-la-xxxiii-olimpiada-internacional-de-biologia-ibo-2022/

[theslothdisciple]

I'm Tan Lee's awkward midspeech cough

[cravingthedistance]

Oh yeah, I totally understand 💁#IntelISEF IntelInvolved

[sciencenewsforstudents]

PHOENIX, Ariz. — After one too many experiences with bias, Prerna Magon, 18, had had enough. The teen decided to do something about it. But directly confronting people’s intolerance usually doesn’t make them change their ways. In fact, this often makes them defensive and angry. So Magon decided to disguise a new bias-busting program as a role-playing game. By having fun and telling a story, teens who play his game became a little less biased without even realizing it.

Magon just graduated from the Police DAV Public School in Jalandhar, India. He had always been interested in psychology, a study of the mind. But the inspiration for his project came when he switched high schools.

Magon's physical traits meant he was labeled a girl at birth. But Magon realized that he was a boy. In an attempt to fit in, this transgender student had attended school as a girl. Only a couple of students knew that Magon identified as a boy.

Gender: When the body and brain disagree

Then, he says, “Somebody outed me when I became head of the student council.” When members of the council found out that Magon was transgender, he notes, “They took my post away.” The council members told him “I could not represent their school.”

Magon transferred to a new school for his senior year. And it was here that he started to design a game to see if he could change people’s implicit biases. These are prejudices that people hold without knowing it. For example, someone might implicitly associate nursing or teaching with women. But both men and women can be teachers or nurses.

The challenge in dealing with implicit biases is that people don’t tend to know they hold them. Yet “they come up in your day-to-day decision-making,” Magon says. “You don’t even realize you’re making a biased decision a lot of the time.” People might automatically assume a scientist is a man, or an artist is a woman.

Magon didn’t want to just tell people they were being biased. After all, everyone wants to think they are fair. Confronting them about bias, he notes, “can lead to resentment.” But if people are just playing a game or telling a story, Magon reasoned, they might change their biases without realizing it.

Game on

Magon invented a role-playing game called “Tell Tall Tales.” It’s based on a deck of cards. Each player draws cards, including a card that begins the game — and a card that can end and win the game. Each player also draws a character card, which will give them some superpower. It might be healing, for example. Or they might become a natural leader — someone able to convince anyone to do anything. Character cards also have sexes listed on them — male, female or no sex at all. But each character’s superpower comes with a side effect. A woman who is a leader, for example, might be seen as bossy.

Each player in the game gets a character with a super power (second card from left). But all the super powers have side effects. CREDIT: B. Brookshire/SSP

Once everyone gets their character, they have to tell a story. Each player has to develop their own character and interact with the others. Players try to take over the story so that they can play their ending card first. This will bring their own story to an end, allowing them to win the game. But if they make mistakes, they have to draw challenge cards. These describe actions they will have to add into the story. A quiet, artistic male character who can draw anything, for instance, might now have to do something quite out of his character, such as give a difficult public speech. The player with that character had better start twisting the story to make it happen.

Magon slipped six different ideas from psychology into his game that make players think about their biases. The first is “perspective taking.” By handing out cards with characters, the game makes players step into someone else’s shoes. Then there’s counter-stereotyping. A stereotype is an idea that is widely held, but isn’t always true — such as the idea that only men are scientists. By giving his characters traits that run counter to stereotypes, Magon hopes the game will make players think of stereotypes in new ways.

Through role-playing, players can make their characters grow. This helps players view their characters as real, complex people, not just some “female doctor,” or “male nurse.” Imagination also is important. Studying how the characters play out the game can help lessen someone’s initial bias, Magon says.

Different situations in the game encourage players to talk about implicit biases. But it doesn’t force them to. Magon hopes players will feel more comfortable about bringing it up as part of the storytelling. Finally, by playing together in a group, players can’t act on their bias. They need to work together. In the end, Magon says, “There’s no us and them; that reduces your bias.”

[stanswyoungscientist]

After an amazing journey at #IntelISEF the STANSW Young Scientist team has landed back home. Thank you to all our supporters in getting the students to the point of representing the country, and to Qantas for getting us home safely #ISEFAUSNSW #IntelISEF2017 (at Sydney Airport)

[wwsef]

#wwsef and #cwsf winner selected to represent #Canada @ #intelisef world fair in May: congratulations to Adam! https://www.youthscience.ca/news/team-canada-isef-2017-announced

[emilie-lauture]

Oh yeah, I totally understand 💁#IntelISEF IntelInvolved

[sciencenewsforstudents]

PHOENIX, Ariz. — When animals travel, they leave bits of themselves behind. Fingerprints and feathers, skin cells and fur. Those bits contain DNA. For some time, scientists have been able to track down this environmental DNA — or eDNA — in soil and in water. Now, two teens have figured out how to also extract it from the air. They hope to use it to track rare birds — even ones people may never see.

Explainer: DNA hunters

Yuma Okamoto,17, and So Tsukamoto, 17, are seniors. Both attend Shizuoka Prefectural Kakegawa-Nishi High School in Kanegawa, Japan. They had previously detected eDNA in water. But when they heard their science teacher, a bird breeder, talk about the debris his animals left behind, the two began to think that eDNA might be in air, too. Their teacher had explained “that bird cages became very dirty with bird sebum,” Yuma says. Sebum (SEE-bum) is an oily substance that birds secrete and use to keep their feathers in good flying shape.

Birds also shed some sebum as they fly. Yuma and So reasoned that they might be able to detect where birds have been by scouting for the eDNA that had come from the sebum shed as a bird flew or perched.

In particular, they wanted to look for signs of owls. “They are nocturnal [active at night], and they have low population density,” Yuma notes. “It is difficult to spot them by eye.” So spotting owl eDNA in the air might be a very efficient way to find them. The teens designed a device that attaches to a tree trunk. It pulls in air and bubbles it through a liquid that collects DNA. Then, Yuma and So could take the solution back to their school and extract any eDNA it had picked up.

This is a Ural owl, a species that Yuma and So were able to detect with their device. CREDIT: Hans Hillewaert/Wikimedia Commons (CC-SA-3.0)

The teens tested their design first on white-cheeked starlings. These birds gather in large flocks, which suggested they should shed lots of eDNA. Yuma and So placed their detector in a spot where starlings liked to hang out. As a control — a part of the experiment where they expected no result — they placed their detector on a different day in some spot where starlings were rare. And the teens were able to show their device easily picked up starling eDNA when starlings were hanging around.

They also showed that the eDNA doesn’t last long. It breaks down quickly when exposed to sunlight and air. It also doesn’t travel far. Even when starlings were only 50 meters (164 feet) away from their perching site, their device could not detect them.

So how well did the teens’ system work at detecting owls, which are much rarer in the environment? On 20 times, at 6 different locations, Yuma and So scouted for owl DNA. Each time, they would leave the detector out for 16 hours — plenty of time for an owl or two to fly by. As a control, the students got owl feathers from a local zoo and a museum. By testing those feathers, they knew what DNA they should be looking for. The teens were able to detect two different species — the Ural owl and the brown hawk-owl.

So and Yuma brought their stealthy bird detector to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. This yearly fair was created in 1950 by Society for Science & the Public, which still runs the event. (The Society also publishes Science News for Students.) This year, the Intel-sponsored fair brought together more than 1,800 students from 80 countries to share their science projects.

“In the future, this method could be applied to a lot of birds,” Yuma says of his new system. “We want to use this method for endangered species,” or species that are shy and hard to spot. The teens also hope to improve their device so scientists can catch birds as they fly by — even if they never see them at all.

Yuma Okamoto (left) and So Tsukamoto (right) show off a video of their invention that sucks air and bubbles through liquid to extract DNA that birds have left behind. CREDIT: C. Ayers Photography/SSP

[stanswyoungscientist]

Jade Moxey from Sapphire Coast Anglican School took out 4th place in the category of Animal #IntelISEF #IntelISEF2017 #STANSW #YoungScientist

[sciencenewsforstudents]

PHOENIX, Ariz. — According to superstition, a four-leaf clover brings good luck. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to grow your own whenever you wanted? A 17-year-old researcher from Japan has found a way to do just that.

The shamrock, maybe the most familiar type of clover, belongs to two species in a genus called Trifolium. That name, which comes from Latin, means three leaves. And it well describes this plant. Only one shamrock in every few thousand has more than three leaves, notes Minori Mori, a 12th grader at Meikei High School in Tsukuba, Japan.

Some companies sell clover seeds that will grow into plants that are more likely to produce four leaves. But even in plants grown from these seeds, four-leafed ones remain rare. Minori wondered if she could somehow boost the odds of getting four-leafed clovers.

The teen showcased her success here, this week, at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, or ISEF. This competition was created by Society for Science & the Public. (The Society also publishes Science News for Students.) The 2019 event, which was sponsored by Intel, brought together more than 1,800 finalists from 80 countries.

Explainer: The fertilizing power of N and P

Four-leaf clovers are most likely to show up in well-fertilized soil, Minori notes. She also knew that a hormone called auxinplays an important role in plant development. She decided to test how auxin and phosphates (an ingredient in common fertilizers), affected the chance of getting four-leafed clovers.

She ordered some of those special white clover seeds (Trifolium repens) and then grew them under a variety of conditions.

Minori Mori grew a few plants with five leaves or more. One of her eight-leaf plants appears below. CREDIT: Minori Mori

Agricultural research has shown that farmers who grow clover should use about 10 kilograms (22 pounds) of phosphate for each 40,000 square meters (10 acres) of farmland, says Minori. But she would be growing her seeds in plastic bins that measured only about 58.5 centimeters (23 inches) long and 17.5 centimeters (7 inches wide). She calculated that would translate to 58.3 grams (about 2 ounces) of phosphate per bin.

She added that amount to some of her bins. Some of these made up her control group, meaning they were grown under normal conditions. The teen added double the normal amount of phosphate to other bins. The seeds in some bins with each dose of fertilizer were watered with a 0.7 percent solution of auxin throughout the 10-day experiment. The others got plain water.

In her control group, 372 of the seeds matured into clover plants. Only four (about 1.6 percent) had four leaves. Two more had five leaves. In bins getting double the normal amount of phosphate but no auxin, 444 of the seeds sprouted into plants. And of these, 14 (or about 3.2 percent) had four leaves. So the extra phosphate doubled the share of shamrocks with more than three leaves.

If terms of four-leaf clovers, adding auxin didn’t seem to help much, Minori found. Only 1.2 percent of the seeds grew into four-leafed clovers if they were fertilized with a normal amount of phosphate and received auxin. That’s a slightly smaller share than in plants that got no auxin. About 3.3 percent of the plants that received both extra phosphate and auxin (304 in all) developed four leaves. That’s almost the same fraction as those receiving double phosphate but no auxin.

Where auxin did make a difference was in encouraging plants to grow more than four leaves. In bins fertilized with both auxin and a double dose of phosphate, a total of 5.6 percent grew more than four leaves. These included 13 with five leaves, two with six leaves, and one each with seven and eight leaves.

“Four-leaf clovers are considered lucky in Japan,” says Minori. “But clover plants with more leaves than that should be considered extra lucky!”

Minori Mori, from Tsukuba, Japan, shows a model of the inside of a clover stalk, which can be encouraged to grow extra leaves by adding fertilizer and a plant hormone. CREDIT: C. Ayers Photography/SSP

[stanswyoungscientist]

Rebekah Kang from PLC Sydney took out 3rd place Environmental Engineering #IntelISEF #IntelISEF2017 #STANSW #YoungScientist (at Los Angeles Convention Center)

[plethora-of-ferrets]

Had a great night bowling with my new friend from New Zealand!