Kids Find Science Where Others Might Dread to Tread

What do barn owls like for a snack?

The question about the rare birds that nest near her home nagged Tiffany Huntting, a sixth-grader at Chaparral Middle School in Moorpark.

As it turns out, barn owls spit out little balls with their prey’s crunchy remains, so the 11-year-old scientist set out to look for clues in the 2-inch pellets.

She roamed through barns and fields to no avail. Undeterred, she turned to a biology store and bought a couple of the regurgitated pellets.

After careful dissection, she found more than 50 tiny bones, many of them hair thin. With the help of anatomical sketches from a book she got at the library, Tiffany pieced the skeleton back together to find her answer: Typo pratincola, as the nocturnal bird is known, is partial to mice.

Tiffany’s findings were among more than 800 science experiments being scrutinized by judges Wednesday for the Ventura County Science Fair.

Standing nervously in front of their booths, students in grades six through 12 from all over Ventura County made presentations on subjects ranging from oil spill cleanups to mutating e coli bacteria to the relative observational powers of males and females.

The aspiring academics were competing for prizes in seven grade categories and nine science areas, from botany to computer science and from earth science to microbiology. Those placing first, second or third in any of the categories will be eligible to participate in the California State Science Fair at the California Museum of Science and Industry in Los Angeles in May.

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Additionally, private corporations, government agencies and nonprofit groups are handing out special awards, including cash prizes and a coveted trip to the U.S. Space Camp in Huntsville, Ala.

“I had never programmed computers before,” Eric Ford said. But the sixth-grader at Our Lady of Guadalupe, a private school in Oxnard, created his own Internet Web page. And he used the Internet to learn how to do it.

Eric surfed the Net until he found a site with a tutorial for HTML, the computer language used to write Web pages. He downloaded the information to his computer and taught himself how to use the programming language.

On Eric’s Web site you can see pictures of his cat, find electronic links to his favorite computer games and click on the mouse to send him a computer message.

Mia Silverman of Ventura reached a practical conclusion with her project, which involved blind taste tests comparing store brands and national brands of several supermarket products. “The more money you spend on a product, the better it tastes,” said the Cabrillo Middle School eighth-grader.

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Jonathan Griffin, a sixth-grader at Westlake School, tested the effectiveness of childproof bottles.

“Most children under 5 were unable to open any of the six childproof containers,” he said. “But they are not so good for kids 6 years or older.” Most of his testers older than 6 were able to open all the containers in less than 30 seconds.

What are the effects of air pollution on plants? What color lenses improve the reading ability of dyslexics? What is the effect of temperature on growing stalactites? How do you use a geographic information system to map narcotics arrests in Oxnard?

You can get the answers to these and hundreds of other questions later today. The science fair is open to the public from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Admission is free.

The awards will be announced by Ventura County Superintendent of Schools Charles Weis at a ceremony beginning at 6:30 p.m.