Congratulations to Ulo and Josh!!

Congratulations are in order!

Josh Ahn and Ulo Freitas both qualified for the IJAS State Science Fair, which will be held May 1-2 at Millikan University. In addition, Josh won Best in Category for Astronomy, while Ulo was selected as one of the five students our region will send to the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), which will be in California this year. 

Josh's work involved doing calibrations on photos and other imaging of candidate systems of binary neutron star mergers, which he did after being trained by astrophysics scientists at Northwestern's CIERA group this past summer. The mergers are first identified through gravitational wave signatures from the LIGO experiment (whose members won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017), and then viewed optically - but there are 'artifacts,' or basically light noise in those photos, that scientists are trying to reduce and eliminate. Josh's work is showing what percentage of images are 'noisy' and recommends that an artificial intelligence algorithm may be the best thing to try to enhance the images. It is these types of mergers that produce the heavy elements above iron, that we are all made of.  His paper can be viewed here: .https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8nURwQwI2RacElJTGhqQ24ydjFqVHFDVmZDZEVRV3ZPZUtr/view

Ulo's work was done in our Research Center, and involved new fluid dynamics measurements of two hydraulic jumps that interfered with each other on an inclined surface. His work will be expanded to use his functional fits to data to modify existing theoretical models of the hydraulic jump, which do not include parameters related to interference or inclined surfaces. We plan on trying to publish his work in a teaching journal, since this can now be used as a lab/inquiry project for other physics classes around the country. His paper and description of his work can be found on my CABS site: 

 http://basement-science.blogspot.com/2020/02/two-hydraulic-jumps-on-incline.html

Two hydraulic jumps on an incline One way professors run their research programs, and as they go from year to year and have new graduate students joining their team while old... basement-science.blogspot.com

Ulo purposely looked for a 'basement' science project because he wants to help demonstrate that original work and discovery can happen in all sorts of experiments that use common household and school materials. The CABS site shares this type of work, as well as hundreds more research options, for any school/student/teacher to use; there are thousands of high schools that do not have access to university labs and do not have research programs of their own, even though there are plenty of students who would like to try research. We want to help those students and schools.