EU's young scientists show off exhibits

Some 105 students from more than 30 countries arrived in Dublin at the weekend for the 16th EU Contest for Young Scientists, held for the first time in the Republic.

The secondary school students will showcase 74 projects including research into alternative rocket propulsion, a spider robot and the "hashcat" project - investigating the possibility of training cats in the skills of sniffer dogs.

All projects, which have already won awards at national level, will be on display free to the public at O'Reilly Hall, UCD, today and tomorrow.

The students will compete on the basis of their work and jury interviews for a total prize fund worth €28,500.

Three first prizes of €5,000, three second prizes of €3,000 and three third prizes of €1,500 will be awarded, as well as travel prizes and work placements.

"Because of the standard of the projects and the scope of the categories, ranging from mathematics to earth sciences to psychology, there was a need to have a number of top prizes rather than one overall," spokesman for the competition Mr Brian Harmon said.

The entrant have come from 22 of the 25 EU states, with a further 10 from non-EU European countries and two "special guest" participants from the US and China.

"It's a little bit like the Eurovision for science, in that it does extend out beyond what is strictly the EU," Mr Harmon said.

However, while all are equal in European terms, the two guest nations are not allowed to compete for the monetary awards. "Their prize is just being there," he said.

This year's competition categories include engineering, physics, computers, mathematics, chemistry, biology, medicine, environment, earth science and psychology, where, in their research into whether it was possible to train cats to look for drugs, a group of Icelandic students used a stash of tea-bags, which apparently have similar properties to cannabis. Cats which used their sense of smell to find the tea were rewarded with a shrimp.

Flying the Irish flag is Ronan Larkin from Dublin, the individual finalist, and the team of Róisín McCloskey and Breandán MacChnoic from Derry.

Ronan has entered with a mathematics project, the same category in which Sarah Flannery, the last Irish winner at EU level, took one of the top prizes in 1999.

Róisín and Breandán are in the physics section, which has proved a popular category this year, with 15 entries. Their project studies the physics of granular systems, using sand piles.

The medicine category includes a Lithuanian study on the properties of mistletoe, which may hold a cure for epilepsy; a way of manufacturing of prostheses more cost effectively, from Hungary; and an analysis of ovarian freezing for fertility preservation, from Israel.