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Clovis West science whiz ninth in national contest(Fresno Bee (CA) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Mar. 10--7:54 P.M.: WASHINGTON -- Exemplary science paid off big-time tonight for Fresno-area high school student Nilesh Tripuraneni, who took home a $20,000 scholarship prize from one of the nation's most prestigious contests. The 18-year-old Clovis West High School senior snagged the $20,000 by finishing ninth place in the Intel Science Talent Search contest. That's not all. Nilesh is also returning home with an additional $5,000 scholarship, a new laptop computer and some distinctive memories. "I didn't expect to win, so this is great," Nilesh said. ------ 12:30 p.m.: WASHINGTON -- Fresno-area high school student Nilesh Tripuraneni is living large, thanks to his super-sized talents in science and math. He's competing tonight for $100,000. He's dining with Nobel Prize winners and staying, gratis, at a hotel where the nightly rates normally run $545 and up. He's met with President Barack Obama in the White House. "I think it's pretty cool," Nilesh said. Yes. Yes, it is. The 18-year-old Clovis West High School senior is one of 40 finalists in the annual Intel Science Talent Search contest. Even before tonight's award ceremony, Nilesh has already scored meetings with Obama on Monday and members of Congress today. At a minimum, Nilesh also will be taking home a new laptop computer and a $5,000 scholarship. If he places in the Top 10, he will earn a minimum of $20,000, all the way up to the top prize of a $100,000 scholarship. Put another way, the top prize would pay for roughly two years attendance at either Stanford or California Institute of Technology, both of which have already sent Nilesh letters indicating the probability of his acceptance. Or -- who knows? -- he might end up on the East Coast for college. "It's nice to win, but you don't go here to win," Nilesh reasoned. "All the people here are amazing." His physics project is titled: A Relativistic Generalization of the Navier-Stokes Equations to Quark-Gluon Plasmas. People who care about the Big Bang and the first few seconds of the universe will care about this project and may even understand it. "Nilesh was able to one-dimensionally model quark-gluon plasma hydrodynamic expansion and predict energy density fluctuations," explained Intel Science Talent Search officials, who obviously already speaks the language. Nilesh's project, summed up on a three-part poster, earned him a trip to Washington along with his mother, Indira, a pharmacist. They've been staying at the St. Regis Hotel, whose least expensive rooms are described as a "sanctuary of luxury." The big bathroom mirrors have, of all things, television screens embedded in them. On Monday, inside the ornate Great Hall of the National Academy of Sciences, near the Lincoln Memorial, Nilesh and the other finalists stood by their project posters and chatted with each other and the occasional passerby. Some projects looked immediately practical. An Oklahoma student, Melissa Carvell, designed stronger body armor for soldiers. Elizabeth Coquillete of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, built a search-and-rescue robot that uses an infrared camera to track disaster survivors. "Search and rescue is really a big topic for infrared sensing right now," said Elizabeth, 18. Still other projects eluded a layman's immediate grasp, like Illinois resident Eric Shyu's memorably titled "Luminescent Cadmium Coordination Polymers with Diverse Structural Morphologies Constructed from Dicarboxylate and 4,4'-Dipyridylamine Ligands." To finish in the serious money Tuesday night, Nilesh will have had to prevail in other challenges beyond the quality of his research and presentation. Over the weekend, Nilesh and the 39 other Intel contest finalists faced solo grilling by four panels made up of three scientists each. Some questions were basic problem solving; for instance, how might one maneuver a satellite without touching it? Others required the muscle of imagination. Judges, for instance, asked Nilesh what he would ask an alien from outer space if they had only three minutes to talk. Some students apparently asked for things like a cure for cancer, Nilesh said. He said he would ask the alien what question he should ask in order to get the most useful reply, a variation on Donald Rumsfeld's "you don't know what you don't know" riff. "It's not only that you have an answer," Nilesh said, "but that you have a reasoning process for how to get an answer." Nilesh is ranked first in his class of 603 students at Clovis West. He and the other Intel contest finalists were selected from 1,608 entries nationwide. Twenty-two of the 40 finalists are of Asian or Indian descent. 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