NEW YORK TEENS GO HEAD TO HEAD
NEW YORK TEENS GO HEAD TO HEAD
Regional High School Students to Compete in Brain Bee
New York, Feb. 4, 2008 — The day before Valentine’s Day, many teens are obsessing over chocolates and flowers. But select students from more than 20 area high schools will instead be frantically trying to remember how the brain works.
The New York City Regional Brain Bee is a live Q & A competition that tests high school students’ knowledge of neuroscience. Students, selected by their high schools to compete, are quizzed on the brain and how it relates to memory, emotions, intelligence, behaviors, and disorders. It is presented by the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives and co-sponsored by NRTA: AARP’s Educator Community and the Society for Neuroscience.
Dr. A. James Hudspeth will judge and emcee this year’s competition, to be held at 5 pm at The Rockefeller University, where he is a professor. Dr. Hudspeth, a noted neuroscientist and member of the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives, specializes in hearing and equilibrium.
At last year’s Bee, a senior from Staten Island Technical School took first after besting the second- and third-place finishers, from Manhattan’s Marymount School of New York and Queens’ Townsend Harris High School, respectively. She correctly answered the question, “What do you call cell death due to external factors that disrupt the normal biochemical processes in the cell?” (The answer is necrosis.)
The 2008 competition will be the first in which competitors from Westchester take part, vying with students from the five boroughs for the grand prize: $250 and an all-expenses paid trip to the National Brain Bee at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, held on the last two days of Brain Awareness Week, March 14-15. There, students from more than 25 states will compete for the national title and the chance to go up against teens from around the world at the first-ever International Brain Bee, to be held in Canada this May.
Brain Awareness Week is an international campaign coordinated by the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives. The Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives is a nonprofit organization of more than 265 neuroscientists committed to advancing public awareness of the progress and promise of brain research. For more information, visit www.dana.org.
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