ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, November 17, 1996 TAG: 9611180068
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
A HORSE IS A HORSE? OF COURSE NOT, if you know anything about horse genetics, one of the hurdles in Saturday's Science Olympics at Roanoke College.
``An English Quaker, he is best known for the Law of Multiple Proportions and the first development of the atomic theory," said quiz master Ben Huddle.
English Quaker? He might as well be Greek to most of us.
We wouldn't have stood a chance in the Chemistry Jeopardy event at Saturday's 18th annual Science Olympics at Roanoke College.
We'd have been burned like so many Bunsens, dissected like so many formaldehyde-soaked frogs by the gang of 18-year-old high school science whizzes.
"Who is James Dalton?" buzzed in a girl from E.C. Glass High in Lynchburg. Chalk up 400 more points in the Great Chemists category.
"The mass of one mole of chlorine gas, to the nearest gram," read another question. The same girl buzzed in. "Thirty-five point five."
Wrong. It's 71.
"Remember," said Huddle, "It's diatomic, so you have to multiply by two."
Now, why didn't we think of that?
Perhaps we would have done better in one of the other eight events in which the 16 high school teams from all over the Roanoke and New River valleys and as far away as Harrisonburg competed. The events are designed to make science fun, said contest organizer Frank Munley, a physics professor at the college.
And what could be more fun than the acid-base puzzle event, or the finite state machines computer science event, or horse genetics?
"Who knows anything about horse genetics?" griped a jovial Michael Gillespie, representing Northside High.
"It's kind of an obscure topic," added his teammate, Nicholas Drinkwine. Like acid-base puzzles are typical supper-time twaddle.
But then these aren't run-of-the-mill kids.
Amy Harrell's Northside grade-point average out of a possible 4.0? "It's 3.923."
"It went down?" asked Gillespie. That pesky 93 she made in English last year, Harrell explained.
But English wasn't a required strong suit for anyone competing Saturday. A good set of lungs would not have hurt, though.
Between the 13-minute events, the teams dashed from one floor of Trexler Hall to the next.
"Boo!" shouted a cackling Iggy to teams approaching the environmental event. Iggy was actually research assistant David Deshler, dressed in rubber boots, gloves and apron with pop-bottle-thick glasses and blackened teeth.
"Iggy is constructed to be the most visually pleasing creature in the universe," said Mike Rosenzweig, a biology professor who danced around in a white wig and lab coat, babbling in a faux German accent.
In Rosenzweig's event, competitors tasted four colored substances, each with a different flavor. The idea was to associate the taste with the color enough to identify the flavors by color a few minutes later.
"Ee-yecccch," coughed Chip Mason-Hill of Liberty High, scratching furiously at his tongue after getting a good dose of salt.
"Don't puke!" shouted a cackling Iggy, who looked over Mason-Hill's shoulder.
Down at the horse genetics event, students were trying to identify a half-dozen pictures of horses by genetic characteristics. Some kids bounced around terms like "heterozygous" and "gene locus."
Others were less sophisticated. "That's brown-brown, isn't it?" asked a girl from Staunton River High. "I hope it's brown-brown."
The crew from Northside approached the event with no small amount of trepidation, but zipped through it like thoroughbreds. Midway through the competition, they had the fastest time.
"But it doesn't matter if we got it all wrong," noted Harrell, the girl with the plummeting GPA.
When the brain cells settled, Radford High had turned in the highest point total of the day. The team took home a trophy for first place in the small school category, followed by Floyd County and Harrisonburg.
In the large school category, Blacksburg took first, with Cave Spring second. Patrick Henry High tied with Lynchburg's Heritage High for third.
Despite their impressive knowledge of horse genetics, the Northside team missed a third-place tie by half a point. Whatever initial reservations they had about their knowledge of equine genes, the Northside kids knew their chestnuts from their bays. Northside nailed nine of 13 answers in the horse genetics event.
"We did our best, and that's all we did," Harrell said.
LENGTH: Medium: 87 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ERIC BRADY/Staff. Herr Dr. Rosenzweig (Mike Rosenzweig,by CNBleft) and Iggy (Dave Deshler) work with area seniors Saturday during
the 18th annual Science Olympics at Roanoke College. color.