Kennedy seniors honored in Intel Talent Search

Kennedy High School senior Beatrice Brown’s home was nearly destroyed on Aug. 11, 2011, when Tropical Storm Irene struck. A foot and a half of saltwater inundated the one-story south Merrick home, which took half a year to rebuild.

Then the house was struck a second time –– on Oct. 29, 2012.

Superstorm Sandy wreaked even greater havoc. This time, four and a half feet of saltwater flooded Brown’s home. “The beds were floating,” she recalled. “Nothing was as we left it. The water line was over the tables.”

Brown spent nearly a year camping out on an aunt’s floor while her family’s home was rebuilt once again.

Brown, now 18, said she wanted to know precisely why storms the magnitude and strength of Irene and Sandy hit Long Island, and so she set out to find answers in an expansive research study that examined local storm data dating back more than 140 years.

For her effort, Brown was named one of 300 semifinalists in the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search last Wednesday. She was one of four participants in Kennedy’s Authentic Science Research Program to earn Intel semifinalist status.

Samuel Epstein, 18, of Bellmore, looked at how microbes –– both good and bad –– might affect the daily diet of the fruit fly, which lives but 10 days on average. Epstein said he wanted to see whether certain microbes increased or decreased appetite, and whether reduced nutritional intake affected longevity. (Spoiler alert: It did. The less the fruit flies ingested, the longer they lived.)

Justin Shapiro, 17, of Merrick, pored through hundreds of pages of annual reports filed by 50 large corporations, looking at whether there was a correlation between their profits and their efforts to curtail their greenhouse gas emissions in order to reduce the threat of climate change, the slow heating of the Earth caused when greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane accumulate in the atmosphere. Shapiro found that the size of a company’s profits did not affect its climate mitigation efforts one way or another.