Exhibition throws up the unexpected

YOUNG SCIENTISTS:BEN McREDMOND adopted the old idea that if you want something done right then do it yourself. Seeing inadequacies in existing web page programming languages he decided to invent one of his own.

The 15-year-old fourth year student from Gonzaga College in Dublin spent the last "three months solid" devising and then programming his new language called Cirrus. "I wasn't satisfied with PHP [an existing language] but that didn't make sense because it was developed specifically for web design," he said.

He encountered similar problems with other languages and decided he could do better, keeping the parts he liked, discarding some and improving others.

About 2,600 lines of computer programming later, he now has a working version of Cirrus with about 20 per cent of the functionality he wants from the language.

He describes it as a "new type of language" that is able to combine the framework for creating web sites with the language on which it is based. He is unsure whether to continue with the project, however, given the amount of work and time it would demand.

The BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition can throw up the unexpected, such as a 12-year-old doing aeronautical engineering research for her project on the merits and demerits of fan-jet engine designs.

Michaela Begley is a first year student at St Vincent's Secondary School, Dundalk, Co Louth, and she decided to test whether a model fan-jet turbo blade worked more efficiently with or without an associated collar or "nacelle". "I am testing to see if you removed the nacelle would it be more efficient," said Michaela.

Being without a jet aircraft on which to experiment, she devised and built - with a little help from her father - a test rig that uses a turbocharger from a diesel engine, a hair dryer motor and a plastic fan to mimic the air movement encountered in normal flight.

"I found there was no difference, it took in the same amount of air [with or without the removable nacelle]," she said. Her mother worked as an engineer at Rolls Royce and Michaela thinks engineering might also be for her. "I would like to do the designing of aeroplanes," she stated.

There was no engineering but plenty of maths in the project pursued by Eamon Hennelly McCarthy, a first year student at Skerries Community College.

The 13-year-old is on the hunt for the largest known prime number and also aspires to locating what are known as "mammoth" primes, which carry with them a finder's prize of $3,000 (€2,140).

His project explains prime numbers (numbers divisible only by themselves and by one) with a focus on a particular type known as a Mersenne Prime. He picked up software from www.mersenne.org which allows his computer to search for a prime literally for weeks. By fortuitous timing, he expects to learn today whether his number, 243112609 - 1 , is a true prime that will allow him to claim the world record, at least until the next largest prime is discovered.