Tuesday, February 07, 2012
10-year-old student accidentally discovers explosive new molecule
Despite being somewhat of a hollywood cliche, serendipitous scientific discoveries rarely ever happen. Just ask any scientist and that person will tell you about all the painstaking detail that goes into designing an experiment to hone in on specific probable outcomes. But when they do happen, heck, they make for pretty good stories. And when it’s a 10-year old girl accidentally discovering a potentially explosive molecule, it’s definitely worth me telling you about it.
The little prodigy in question is fifth grader Clara Lazen, whose class assignment was to build a molecule using one of those modeling kits with the colorful balls and plastic connectors. Many kids would probably throw together a little H2O and call it a day — but not Clara. She randomly pieced together a combination of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon atoms to create a molecule her chemistry teacher, Kenneth Boehr, had never seen before.
“I just saw that these go together more,” Clara told the Fox News local affiliate in Kansas City. “Like they fit more together. And they look better. And all the holes have to be filled in for it to be stable.”
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