The Today show had a segment this morning on the 2005 Discovery Channel Young Scientist Challenge. They began with a spokewoman from the Discovery Institute explaining that we lose kids in science in middle school and they are trying to change that witheducational programs and contests. I note the today show couldn't get the name of the contest right for the text on the screen, they just wrote "Discovery Scientist Challenge".
They introduced Neela Thangada, 14, who was the grand prizewinner this last year. As she described it, she cloned potatoes to produce a higher yield of crops. In her profile linked to above, she measured the effects of different nutrient concentrations on the cloning process.
The theme of the challenge this year was "forces of nature" and they had two museum-like experiments set up. They had two water containers setup, one was a tornado and the other a tsunami. In one they created a vortex and then put a propellor in to measure the windspeed. It's closer near the vortex then further away. In the other they had a shoreline setup and pulled a lever to generated a wave to see the effects on the shore and on some buoys setup off shore.
The Today show host was David Gregory, who I normally like in the White House Press room, but here he was an idiot. While Neela was explaining the experiments he tried to keep up and to dumb down her descriptions for the audience. She said "the model was 1/20 the size of the actual experiment". He had to explain "so this is a minature version". As the vortex started and there were lots of bubbles in the water he says "are we making a smoothie or a tornado?" She asked his prediction for where the higher speeds were (that would be forming a hypothesis to test). He said "Hmm, I don't know how about away from the...I say closest to the ah funnel actually". You know his ear piece corrected him. Then as he had problems putting the measuring device into the tank he said "There's something in there. There's a shark in there!"
They then moved to the tsunami demo as they were running out of time. Neela described it well in about 30 seconds. He then came in and said "all right, all right, we're gonna have to leave it there, lets keep doing it, seeing how it works here". He then pushed the lever back and forth to make a huge wave, much as a child would. Neela was literally laughing at what he was doing. When they came back from commercial the next segement James Blunt singing a song from his new album. Edward R. Murrow must have been rolling over in his grave.
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