This School Knows Its Science

Space apprentices though they were, they could sense that magnetism held more intellectual weight than Jell-O, and they submitted the magnetism experiment to Ignatiev.

Coincidentally, it meshed nicely with Ignatiev's Elementary School Science Project. Ignatiev has spent five years overseeing the construction of a $13.5 million sample free-flying platform, on which he'll be trying to grow an ultra-high-quality semiconductor film in a near-perfect vacuum.

Success with his experiment could have vast implications for the microelectronics industry, which produces such things as cellular telephones and high-definition televisions for Elementary School Science Project.

During the flight, Ignatiev will be in Houston, Texas, monitoring the growth of gallium arsenide wafers by firing electrons at them and calculating electron beam diffraction. Those same electron beams will also register changes in the earth's magnetic field.

When the astronauts return from their nine-day mission 200 miles above the earth, they'll bring reams of data for Hartmann's group to crunch. Already, students say they've benefited from working closely in a group this size. They talk excitedly about possibly entering the project in the school's spring science fair, which has had a standing limit of two or three people to a project. "It would be awesome to work together in the science fair," Gretchen Urich said.

Ignatiev said that while the students' findings will "probably not" be something "craved by scientists around the world," the experiment will give the young teens "an opportunity to see how they could make a difference in their world."

Call it cosmic coincidence, but that's very much in the spirit of Greg Jarvis, who eventually became a top engineer at Hughes Aircraft in California and beat 700 others for a seat for the ill-fated Challenger trip.

"He was not a brilliant student," said his mother, Lucille Ladd. "He had to work really hard for what he got. He was always doing something new, and he always had a goal in mind."

Don't tell Rashida Ali she's special. But in the midst of the chaos, Ali, 16, worries about more important things - like the effects of gamma radiation used on food to kill bacteria.

Ali is one of 22 students from Strawberry Mansion Middle and High School who won top honors at city and regional science fairs. The students will be honored at the school today during a special assembly. In the last three years, Strawberry Mansion has become science central. Its students are second only to Central and Masterman, two of the city's top magnet schools, in science-project winners.