Winner Of Intel Science Competition

W A S H I N G T O N, March 13 -- Although they haven't even graduated from high school, young researchers like Mariangela Lisanti are already making noteworthy contributions to science.

Lisanti, 17, carried off the top honors Tuesday at this year's Intel Science Talent Search. The senior from Staples High in Westport, Conn., was awarded a $100,000 college scholarship. She also got to meet President Bush at the White House last Thursday.

She is the third woman in a row to win top prize in the annual contest sometimes dubbed the "junior Nobels."

Other winners include Nathaniel Craig, 18, who won second place and a $75,000 scholarship for his project on the thermodynamics of super-cooled liquids, and Gabriel Carroll, 18, awarded the third-place $50,000 scholarship for his work on the mathematics of partially ordered sets.

Tiny Technology, Big Future

In simple terms, Lisanti's project measures the rate at which pulses of electricity pass through an extremely tiny gold-based wire.

To better understand electron transport in such nanostructures (objects that have a physical dimension smaller than 0.1 micron, or 100 billionths of a meter), Lisanti developed a new measurement apparatus that enables data acquisition at an unprecedented rate. Using "nanowires" only a few atoms wide, electrical current is transmitted in bursts, rather than as a continuously.

Lisanti says her invention measures this flow through nanowires better than any technique that existed before.

"With the device that I built, you can collect data, three to one-thousand times faster than other techniques," Lisanti told ABCNEWS' Good Morning America. " It's about $35 worth of equipment in comparison to $100,000."

Lisanti's hopes her new device can be used to aid the super-miniaturization of electronics.

She says the field of "nanotechnology" — in which atoms are used in place of traditional electronic components — may eventually lead to the development of super-computers the size of a dime.