Young scientist cuts image down to size

It is all about getting a litre into a half litre bottle. A student from Coláiste Chiaráin, in Leixlip, Co Kildare, has devised a way to compress the computer space needed to store pictures.

Transition year student Thomas Whelan (16) is a first time entrant to the Esat BT Young Scientist exhibition. "I entered because I wanted to see if I could do it," he said yesterday.

The technology is known as computer compression and most commercial companies use systems based on numbers only. "I am using numbers and letters to crush down the image size," he said.

The idea came to him during a class where the teacher was explaining the hexadecimal system, a counting system that uses letters and numbers. He decided to apply this to image compression because of its ability to store equal amounts of information in a smaller amount of computer memory.

He wrote his own programme using Visual Basic to carry out the image compression. It takes a picture pixel by pixel and converts it into a hexadecimal value, storing these as a long string of data. "I started in September and tried a few different ways of doing it. I finalised it by November," says Thomas. "It's as good as the commercial programmes but it is possible to make it more compact."

Conor Cuddy (15), Eoin Jordan (15), and Conor Harrington (16), from Marist College, Athlone, tried to end the bane of golfers - the lost ball.

Their idea was to embed metal in the golf ball so a metal detector might find it. The challenge was to find a method that did not affect the flight of the ball when struck, said Eoin.

They tried many approaches including metallic paint, paint with metal filings and a ball that had a piece of metal in its centre. Their most radical idea was drilling into a ball, adding liquid mercury and then sealing it.