NEWBURY PARK : Student Wins String of Science Awards

A Newbury Park High School student who won first-place awards last year in both the Ventura County Science Fair and the California Science Fair has won a national science prize with an expanded version of the same experiment.

Richard Horowitz, 15, won first place in the junior division of the Thomas Edison-Max McGraw Scholarship Competition, sponsored by the Illinois Institute of Technology, after presenting his research and conclusions to a panel of judges in Chicago last week.

More than 800 students from around the country entered the contest, said a spokesman for the school. Richard won a $3,000 scholarship.

His experiment measured the effects of increases in temperature on reaction time and established a method for determining the optimum temperature at which a person reacts to visual stimuli.

In the first part of the experiment, which was presented in the local and state science fairs, Richard exposed five people to a sudden 20-degree increase in temperature and then measured how quickly they reacted to a dot on a computer screen.

In the second part of the experiment, which he plans to submit at this year’s county science fair, the temperature was increased in two-degree increments to find the temperature at which subjects’ reactions were quickest. He found that his subjects reacted best at temperatures from 72 to 78 degrees.