![]() ![]() ![]() ” A teen may work in a lab that has money to study cancer or HIV. “This is guesswork,” he says, “but it would be hard to imagine that aren’t affected by. It also reflects trends in research, generally. The trend away from plants and toward medicine, health and engineering reflects more than teen interest, he says. I think there’s so much interesting stuff there.” “I guess it’s not considered sexy enough anymore,” he says. Although a computer scientist at the University of Maine in Orono, he feels sad to see so few plant science projects. Sudarshan Chawathe chaired the judging panel for this year’s STS competition. Both of those categories each bring in fewer than 40 STS applications per year - only about two percent. Plants and Earth science, however, aren’t very popular topics. There’s also been a big recent spike in cellular and molecular biology projects. Throughout the past decade, the number of engineering projects has gone up, Hewlett Stifel notes. This year’s winner was an exoplanet hunter.) (Don’t think you need to study these most-popular topics to win, though. ![]() But they also might stay at home, developing a smartphone app to diagnose a particular disease. Here, teens might work in a laboratory with adult scientists to study new some new drug to treat a disease such as cancer. The next most popular category is medicine and health. Students working in these fields might study anything from how robots read emotions to techniques to shut down bullying. The most popular category now, by far, is behavioral and social sciences. It’s been a long time since the glory days of the space race. If they instead select “environmental science,” that’s the type of scientist who will take an initial read of their application. They might want to select “plant science” and know that a plant scientist will see it first. ![]() Say a teen’s project is both about plants and the environment. What topic they choose determines the type of scientist who will end up seeing their application first. Teens choose which category their project falls under, explains Alison Hewlett Stifel. Not surprisingly, the data show that the popularity of topics can shift widely over time. So to answer this question, we dug into 10 years of data and almost 20,000 project submissions. When it comes to the STS candidates, which topics have proven most popular? Science News for Students is run by the same organization as STS. A simple home computer can now analyze big data from exoplanets millions of light-years away.Īnd as science changes, science projects may, too. In the last 10 years, smartphones have put a camera and computer in nearly everyone’s hands. We’ve gone from the space race and landing an astronaut on the moon to mapping the DNA blueprint of our species and many others. Science has changed a lot in the last 77 years. Among the many items that entrants had to submit to qualify was a science-research project.īut there wasn’t a baking soda volcano in the bunch. (STS is now sponsored by Regeneron, a company that makes medications to treat diseases such as asthma and cancer.) Any U.S. And it has been almost since its founding in 1942 by Society for Science and the Public. science competition for high school students. The Science Talent Search, or STS, is arguably the premier U.S. It turns out that the key to finding a science fair project is sticking close to home. What’s hot and what’s not? We decided to crunch the data from the past 10 years of the Regeneron Science Talent Search to find out. But these days, you’re far more likely to find new smartphone apps and computer programs. When most people consider a science fair, they might think of baking soda volcanoes and model rockets. ![]()
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