All the students who competed are freshmen, and were among just a handful of outstanding science students around the state who qualified to compete.

Participating at the state science fair from Hotchkiss High School were the team of Kyle Tallent, Ben Smith and Kasey Miles, and individual competitors Vikash Hypio and Nicki Burhdorf. Hypio will compete at the national science fair in Reno, Nev., in May.

The team of Ben Smith, Kasey Miles and Kyle Tallent researched and tested their hypothesis that stress negatively affects the vascular patterns in the eyes of cattle. Their project, which was called, "Presenting the Champion, Or Maybe Not," earned the team an honorable mention and fourth place in the senior division of best team project. They were also presented an award by the Colorado Association of Meat Processors for their work.

The team tested seven cattle by first shining an LED light into each cow's eyes, recording the image, and then stressing the eye, after which they took another LED image. They got the idea for the project from the Optibrand ClearView^TM Optical Imaging System, which is a patented technology from a Ft. Collins company that provides digital retinal scans of animals for source verification. The team wondered if there was a discrepancy in the company's claims that the technology was humane. They found that in 50 percent of their tests, the cattle's eyes were stressed by the technology. Smith, Miles and Tallent are also taking their project to the FFA science fair at the state convention later this year.

Nikki Buhrdorf placed third in the senior division of plant science, for her project titled, "Aspens in a State of SADness: A Statistical Analysis of the Decline of Populus tremula." She went to Grand Mesa and took an analysis of 100 aspen trees to find some common factors in the tree decline. She looked at factors like elevation, tree maturity, regrowth, presence and severity of fungi and/or insects and percent of dead bark and crown.

Her research netted 600 different graphs that showed several trends in Sudden Aspen Decline. Using a Chi-square diagram, she measured her results and found three major reasons for SAD. She found that SAD was worse when regrowth wasn't coming back, even in healthy trees; for trees at lower elevations; and when poplar bore, an insect, and cytospora canker, a fungus, were present.

Vikash Hypio won second place in the senior division of math and computer sciences. He tested three different voting methods against plurality, the method used in U.S. elections currently.

His project, "Voting Systems: An Outcome Analysis" tested board count, instant runoff and sequential voting patterns by testing first four types of soda in 64 subjects and then five varieties of candy bars in 65 subjects.

Hypio's goal was to see which method had the highest level of voter satisfaction.

He came up with two results. The first was that an overwhelmingly popular choice, in his case a Snickers bar, would win in a landslide no matter what voting system was used.

His second outcome, which he likened to the $52 million bond defeat by the Delta County School District last November, found that, had a different system been used than the plurality method, there would have been a huge difference.

In his example, had the votes been cast using the board count method, voters would have had the chance to vote for no money, $10 million, $30 million, $40 million or the entire $52 million. Votes would have been cast in a ranking system from least to most preferred. The least preferred would have been taken out of the equation, and then the remaining four options voted on again, and so on, until the final outcome. If this method had been tested, Hypio hypothesized, the outcome could have been that the school district got some money and the tax payers would have been satisfied as well.

He will travel to Reno, Nev., in May, for the international science fair. He'll compete against 1,500 other projects from high school students in 50 countries.

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