@PopularMechanics _ May 2019 85TH E L A RG E ST
SCIENCE FAIR
IN THE WORLD
How does that work?
It’s called “ballooning,” and is
most common among young,
small spiders, says Angela
Chuang, who works in the
department of ecology and
evolutionary biology at the
University of Tennessee.
After climbing to a high sur-
face, the spider points its
abdomen into the wind and
releases silk from its spinner-
ets. The silk “balloons” from
the spider like a sort of para-
chute, then a combination
of air currents and electrical
fields catch hold of the silk and
lift it—and the spider—into
the air.Why do spiders want to fly?
Unlike ants or bees, which work
together in a group, most spi-
ders live alone. When spiders lay
egg sacs, those sacs can con-
tain hundreds of baby spiders.
If they all stayed in the same
place, those spiders would have
to compete with each other for
food. So they fly away.How far can they go?
Chuang says that some scien-
tists have documented spiders
traveling as far as 2,000 miles.
But since it’s so hard to track
these tiny, eight-legged para-
chutists, we don’t know exactly
how far is normal.STARTING MAY 12, the technology
company Intel will host its annual Inter-
national Science and Engineering Fair
(ISEF). This year it’s in Phoenix, where
nearly 2,000 high school students from around the world will compete for prizes. We talked
to one of last year’s winners, Dhruvik Parikh, an 18-year-old from Washington State, about
what it was like to go home with a Young Scientist Award—and $50,000!
When he heard he won, Parikh was in shock. “Just going to the ISEF was something I’d
dreamed of for four years,” he says. Parikh created a part that allows batteries to capture wind
and solar energy more efficiently and for less money than the way we currently do it. “Our power
grid is really old. It’s optimized for fossil fuels [such as oil and natural gas],” he says. “So what
I was looking at was building these batteries that can be reused in the power grid in order to
make the usage of renewable energy more efficient.”
Parikh’s invention could help the world. And so could yours. For more information on ISEF,
go to student.societyforscience.org/intel-isef.