WASHINGTON, D.C.--After toiling day and night for months, 17 high school students garnered prizes in the Siemens Westinghouse Competition in Math, Science and Technology that ranged up to $100,000. The teenagers, who worked in genetics, astrophysics, and other disciplines, were joined by family members during a ceremony here with all the nail-biting tension of the Academy Awards.

The Siemens Westinghouse competition, begun in 1998, is one of two lucrative science awards for high school students (see Science, 10 December 1999, p. 2056). This year, five individuals and six two-person teams were picked as finalists, competing for the top prize of $100,000 in each category. The competition was notable for the large percentage of female finalists--more than half--compared to previous years.

The top individual prize of $100,000 went to Steven Byrnes of Lexington, Massachusetts, who won for a new mathematical theorem he called the Poset Game Periodicity Theorem. Poset--or partially ordered set--games are a class of two-player games with relevance for artificial intelligence and various computer network problems. Byrnes's theorem gave a winning strategy for a large class of poset games, as well as resolving questions about one particular poset game called Chomp. "We were gearing ourselves up for third [place]," says the winner's elated mother, Marsha Byrnes. "It hasn't sunk in yet."

Juliet Girard and Roshan Prabhu of Jersey City, New Jersey, garnered first place in the team competition and will split the $100,000 prize. They mapped two chromosomal regions and three genes in the rice species Oryza rufipogon that help control early flowering. The pair hope that their research will help in the development of early-harvest rice varieties.

Other award-winning projects included the first observation of superconductivity in lithium, by Wei Gan of Potomac, Maryland, who co-authored a recent Science paper on the subject (published online 17 October 2002); an astronomy project that used infrared and x-ray data to infer the existence of an intermediate mass black hole, by Elysa Wan of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Nigel K. Mesta of Statesville, North Carolina; and a novel algorithm to identify stretches of bacterial DNA that regulate gene expression, by Vlad Codrea, of Austin, Texas. Codrea, who emigrated to the United States from Romania at age 8, says he became interested in controlling bacterial growth after watching a documentary on Escherichia coli in hamburgers.

--JENNIFER COUZIN