My suggestion to you is to go visit the displays of prior school year science fairs … what did they do in the years immediately prior to you, in other communities … you will find that tons of kids are doing variations on the same thing.

Well you don’t want to do a science project on something that thousands of other kids have done, unless you see a way to do a much better job than the competition, have yours stand out above the crowd.

You”ll see physics, chemistry, biology, sciences you never heard of. Take notes what sciences, what experiments … you are looking for the kind of thing not a lot of kids are doing, and you are looking for ideas how to do THAT better than the mob, better than your peers out there, so that after the science fair that YOUr stuff is at, the judges will be talking about your stuff for years.

How you package, present your information, your results, so they are understandable to a spectrum of audiences, that is important.

* understandable to your peers, to the common joe or jane

* understandable to your teachers, and the judges

but your data also written up in a professional manner

Avoid doing anything that is dangerous, or has the appearance of being dangerous, either in how you do your analysis, or in how you present your results. You don’t want to be encouraging risk taking in physical reality, only in the intellectual area.

In other words, I am advising against you dreaming up new and better ways to make weapons, but perhaps you can devise better technologies to detect threats.

Don’t be a storm chaser, but it is Ok to find new ways to analyse data about storms.

Be careful about accepting conventional wisdom about controversial topics. Figure out how to do experiments to find out one way or another about stuff.

So some ideas for needs of today and tommorrow.

Let’s suppose we have some disaster with our planetary system, or human conflicts, and need to spend more time indoors. What plants can thrive when no access to natural sunlight?

There’s fires all over the place. Can we come up with construction material that is more resistant to the fires, so that people could hunker down inside bunkers, breath from air supplies, while the fire wipes out what is outside?

Robots lack eyesight as good as that of an animal. Can you advance that technology?

Do we know how much memory is in human brain, how many memory proteins, how many thinking circuits? We do know the rate at which computer capacity is growing? How close is computer capacity to human thinking capacity? What challenges of science fiction in artificial intelligence are we now on the thresh hold of? Can you arrange simulations to demonstrate these challenges?

Mankind has found many ways to muck up our planet. Can we use science to reverse the trend?

Think of some kind of plant life of microbes that feeds on oil in sea water, to help clean up after an oil spill … especially useful if we can also extract the oil from the plant later, without killing the plant.

How about some kind of life that will absorb water in a bad storm of flood.