By John Travis
With the presidential nominations for both parties settled, the hottest contest in Washington, D.C., this week was the Intel Science Talent Search (STS), which honors research done by high school students around the country. One former STS participant, among a group that includes five Nobel laureates, recalls the finalist competition as his introduction to the “big leagues of science.”
If that’s true, then Viviana I. Risca of Port Washington, N.Y., just hit a grand slam to win the World Series. She took home this year’s top Intel STS prize, a $100,000 college scholarship, for a project on encrypting words within a strand of DNA.