This site will help high school students and teachers find original, independent science research topics and questions that can be done without a professional lab...these can be done in a school lab or even in one's basement! The project ideas and research questions being developed and presented here have been vetted and could lead to true discoveries, and not just finding already known results. See our Welcome message. These are the types of projects that could be done and submitted to high school contests such as the Regeneron Science Talent Search, Junior Science and Humanities Symposium, or the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair, and be competitive. If you have an idea to share, or a question about one of the project ideas, contact us at vondracekm@eths202.org.
Pages (on the right side of the screen) have lists of ideas for different types of science research projects, and clicking on one of those ideas will take you to posts with details and all sorts of information about that type of project. Get more information about why there is a need for CABS!
The Leidenfrost effect is one where water droplets on a hot plate float and move around spontaneously. It is an interesting fluids phenomenon, where the droplet hovers on a thin layer of vapor due to the hot surface. There are numerous experiments that can be done with this type of phenomenon, and it is a wonderful example of something that can be done in a school or home lab setting! Think of ways to vary the experiments you find in articles, to make them unique and your own - this is a way to develop your own original studies and investigations into everyday phenomena.
There are a few articles linked here that get into the use of artificial intelligence in cancer research. AI is revolutionizing many areas of study in all fields of STEM, and of course will only get better and more effective as these technologies continue to advance.
For those interested in STEM, this will be something you will almost certainly learn more about in your studies as you get older and into college. For those interested in things like computer science, computer and electrical engineering, and applied mathematics, this is certainly one of the growth areas in those fields and will only expand.
The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics has been given to three scientists who work in complex systems science. This has been a rapidly growing field of study ever since computers began to be invented and applied to science research. Many of you may be interested in complexity science, emergent properties of systems, self-organization, and many other pieces of this field - it is fascinating, and complex systems are found in nearly all parts of life!
A wonderful resource for learning about complex systems science is the series of modules put out on the Systems Innovation YouTube channel. They have a number of learning modules that introduce us to this type of science; check out one of their videos below.
I recommend checking out the first one defining what a complex system is. One other resource to really learn about and actually work with complex systems computationally, is to use Netlogo (can either download it or run it on the web) and its library of simulations of systems - Netlogo is an agent-based coding platform that is ideal for numerous complex systems problems and simulations! With hundreds of existing programs to run and to modify to make your own while learning how to code, Netlogo is actually used by professors to do computational research!!
Another wonderful resource is the Santa Fe Institute website. This is a leading research institution dedicated to complex systems science, and there are many resources and publications to see what this type of science and research looks like.
Physiology: Two Americans won, David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian, for determining how the body takes physical sensations and turn them into electrochemical signals within the body so the brain can interpret them as changes in temperature and touch. See the announcement and some details here.
Physics: Three split the Prize for their work in understanding the science behind complex systems. One of the best examples of how others apply their work is in climate science, and how one begins to understand one of the most complex systems there is, global climate, that has countless of thousands of parameters and variables that interact in so many ways. How does one approach complexity? How does one go about trying to calculate and simulate such a system? How can we possibly understand how to take microscopic processes and figure out how those affect a macrocosmic system? Well, the work of Giorgio Parisi (Italy), Syukuro Manabe (Japan/Princeton), and Klaus Hasselmann (Germany) created the means to do this.
The Varkey Foundation, which has run the Global Teacher Prize Program since 2015, has now started the Global Student Prize, where a student (high school through college) can win up to $100,000 as a top award. If you want to learn of some AMAZING impacts students have had all around the world, and on national and global scales, check out the Top 50 Finalist students! This is not necessarily STEM related, but reading some of the stories could be fun for you.
A good Science News article about particle detectors, which allow us to figure out what we are all made of! There are hundreds of particles, most of which are combinations of the six quarks! We'll get into this a bit in classes!! Here is the CDF detector from Fermilab; in an earlier life, I helped build, maintain and run this thing. I'm still impressed these most complicated machines and experiments even work! If you are interested in some of the most fundamental questions humans can ask in science, check out particle physics and the Standard Model.
NetLogo is an agent-based programming language developed at Northwestern University, near Chicago and also my high school. This is meant to be an educational language, relatively easy to learn and free for anyone (you can download NetLogo, or you can run on a Web-based platform if you have something like a Chromebook).
There is a large library of existing models in a variety of disciplines, ranging from physics, biology and chemistry to social science, political and financial applications. This video begins to explain what agent-based refers to, and how a NetLogo program operates in concept. Check it out!
