WASHINGTON -- A 14-year-old who studied the elusive subatomic particles called neutrinos won the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search and a US$50,000 scholarship on Monday.
Natalia Toro, a high school senior from Boulder, Colorado, was the youngest winner in the history of the 58-year-old science fair.
Toro studied the elementary particles that have no electrical charge and are thought to have no mass when at rest, but which move at the speed of light. Judges said Toro's work may help explain mysterious shortages of neutrino counts.
Recent Japanese studies suggest neutrinos might oscillate between a state that a neutrino detector can see and one that it cannot. Toro developed an equation to predict theoretical neutrino counts. Her work strongly supports the oscillation theory, according to the judges.
The Intel Science Talent Search, formerly known as the Westinghouse Science Search, is now sponsored by Intel Corp. and Science Service, a nonprofit Washington organization that publishes Science News.
Second place, and a $40,000 scholarship, went to David Moore, 18, of Silver Spring, Maryland, who determined the electrical properties of a newly proposed design for molecular electronic switches. Keith Winstein, 17, of Aurora, Illinois, won a $30,000 scholarship for work on a method to embed information in computerized data without making any perceptible change in the original material.
