Hooked on science

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/06/2002 (8509 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The genetics experiments Will Turk conducted last winter on mouse eyes eventually could help restore human eyesight.

That’s not Dr. Will Turk, world-renowned scientist. That’s Will Turk, a 15-year-old student about to write his Grade 9 exams at Grant Park High School.

The research that Will conducted at the Cancer Care Manitoba lab this winter not only took top prizes at his school, division and provincial science fairs, but won him one of Manitoba’s only two gold medals at last month’s Canada Wide Science Fair in Saskatoon.

“The genes I tested had never been studied before doing mouse eye development. It was truly original work,” Will explained.

It started last fall when Dr. David Eisenstat, of the Manitoba Institute of Cell Biology, did a presentation to the Grade 9 advanced placement science students at Grant Park.

“I asked him if there were any experiments I could do with him. He was doing testing of gene expression in the mouse brain,” said Will. “Gene expression is looking at the products of a gene — RNA or protein. Those are the two main products.”

Using a $100,000 microscope, “I just sort of dived in, doing two experiments in February — two weeks straight of what you’d call bench work, and a week of data analysis.”

The tests involved tissue samples taken from (dead) mouse eyes at four stages of development, concentrating on the Prox1, Six3, and Dlx2 genes.

“These three genes are known as transcription factors; they regulate other genes,” said Will.

Go ahead — try to find this stuff in a Grade 9 textbook.

The applications of such research could change countless lives.

“If you can understand what’s going on in normal eye development, you can look at abnormal eye development and see what genes are being underexpressed or overexpressed,” Will explained. At some time in the future, given enough breakthroughs, “you can do gene therapy, and possibly give people back their eyesight.”

Then he put it all on a white backboard and set it atop a table in the school gym science fair.

His life sciences gold medal brought prizes totalling $2,400 and a trip to any genomics lab in Canada, likely Vancouver.

Will’s gold medal came just days before he was named Grant Park’s Grade 9 male athlete of the year. He’s a wide receiver on the football team, and played volleyball, basketball, lacrosse, hockey and wrestled. Track meant getting up too early for practice, admitted Will, who plans to go to medical school.

“He’s really serious. He’s got good results already,” marvelled St. James-Assiniboia School Division science consultant Lou van Rysselt, who sat beside Will on the plane to Saskatoon.

Van Rysselt spent a lot of time at the national science fair picking the brains of other teachers.

Many have ditched the standard teacher’s handout of science project ideas in favour of finding out what kids like, then challenging them to research its scientific aspects.

“If you can get them to do a project on something they like, or that tweaks them, you’ll get a good project, you’ve got them forever,” van Rysselt said.

A student who lives for skateboarding could examine how the bearings work in the skateboard’s wheels, or research the physical forces at work as he slaloms back and forth along vertical walls.

Ecole Riverside Grade 7 student Martin Nickel won the junior engineering gold for a project designed to cut down the energy spent on illuminating mine shafts by coating the walls with a reflective material.

“Basically, I was trying to develop a reflective coating for underground mines, so the miners would have better visibility,” Martin explained from Thompson.

“The base of the coating is white cement — that’s what makes it stick so well,” he said, adding that hydrated lime and silica sand are other key ingredients.

Martin worked off the Internet, gathering information, then contacting companies by phone and fax.

“One tonne of this mix is $200. It would be less expensive” to use the mix to supplement miners’ helmet lamps, rather than relying strictly on hydro-powered tunnel lights. He’s already been invited to Snow Lake to try out his mixture in a mine, Martin said.

Ecole Riverside won three medals in Saskatoon.

“Science is really big here at this school,” said Riverside principal Jeff McIntyre. “It’s kind of like tradition. The science fair — kids start working on them in November. They’re really gung ho.”

Two of van Rysselt’s star pupils, Grade 7 Lincoln School students Alex Girdner and Brock Bieber, won a bronze competing against older students from across Canada. They also won national awards from Petro-Canada and Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. in energy and environment categories.

They spent eight months testing six brands of gasoline to determine which caused the least air pollution.

“We came to the conclusion that Mohawk ethanol 94 had the lowest carbon dioxide,” declared Brock.

Their major piece of equipment was a ’99 Acura EL four-cylinder, operated by Alex’s parents.

The adults would run the car’s fuel tank down to empty, then drive to a designated gas station and put in 10 litres, Alex explained. When it hit empty again, they’d drive back to that station on fumes, and get another 10 litres — the second time to make sure any residue of other brands was burned off.

Once the Acura got down to empty again, the scientists would hook up a funnel and latex balloon to the exhaust, and measure the pollution.

“Next year,” said Alex, “we’ll try to determine the additives in fuel.”

That involves talking the University of Manitoba into freeing up a light spectrometer. And don’t bet against them doing it.

“These guys are outstanding,” said Lincoln principal Jim Tomes.

Other award winners:

Silver: Amanda Smandych, Manitoba School Science Symposium; Michael Stanford, Ecole Riverside in Thompson; Rachel Fainstein, River Heights School.

Bronze: Andrew Bell and Brodie Davis, western Manitoba; Megan O’Brien, Ecole Riverside in Thompson; Keelan Cumming, Churchill High School.

Honourable mention: Benjamin Eko-Davis, River East School Division; Ashoka Subedar, MSSS; Lynn Blostein, MSSS.

nick.nartin@freepress.mb.ca

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Spy photos nabbed off satellite

LONDON — A satellite enthusiast said yesterday he had tried to warn NATO that surveillance pictures it took from spy planes over the Balkans could be watched by anyone with basic equipment.

John Locker said he stumbled across the images, which were beamed over an insecure satellite link and were not encrypted, in November.

“I wasn’t tapping into anything, the pictures were freely available and anyone could see them,” Locker told British Broadcasting Corp. television.

“They were from a commercial satellite, sending pictures just as any commercial satellite would. In fact, it was easier to see these pictures than pay-per-view films or even Saturday sports.”

Locker said he had been trying to alert United States authorities, including NATO, about the signal for seven months.

“They eventually told me it was a hardware constraint, they were aware of it and they thanked me for my concern,” he said.

Locker said some of the data provided images as close as two metres from the subject and identified vehicles.

“Obviously, I’m not a military analyst and I’m not an expert in this field but I am just amazed this type of material is going out free to air,” he said.

Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon’s Defence Policy Board, told the BBC Newsnight program there were plans to encrypt the data.

“We have discovered in the period since Sept. 11 how important this sort of real-time intelligence is,” he said.

“Now we are making much better use of this kind of information and it will make sense to encrypt it in the future.”

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Astronauts replace robot’s broken wrist

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Two spacewalking astronauts performed surgery on the international space station’s $600 million robot arm yesterday, replacing one of its seven joints to fix what amounts to a broken wrist.

Floating in the space station’s Quest airlock module, astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz and French flier Philippe Perrin officially began the third spacewalk of the shuttle Endeavour’s mission at 11:16 a.m. The planned seven-hour excursion began about a half-hour late because of static in Chang-Diaz’s radio.

The Canadarm2 space crane is critical to the continued assembly of the orbital lab complex. Construction is focused on building a huge solar array truss that eventually will stretch the length of a football field.

Only one of the nine segments of the truss is in place, bolted to the top of the Destiny laboratory module. Canadarm2, riding a motorized rail car on the truss, is required to attach the outboard sections, starting with the next shuttle visit in August.

But one of the two independent control systems used to operate the arm’s wrist-roll joint suffered a subtle malfunction soon after the crane was attached to the station last year, a glitch that can cause the joint’s brakes to lock up.

While the wrist joint works normally when operated through the other control system, NASA wants to restore full redundancy before beginning outboard assembly of the solar array truss.

The arm’s joints were designed to be replaced by spacewalking astronauts, and yesterday’s excursion by Chang-Diaz and Perrin is not considered particularly complicated. But it is critical to the station’s continued construction.

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