Sarah Mims Wins Popular
Mechanics 2005 Breakthrough Award
Sarah Anna Mims has received a 2005
Popular Mechanics magazine Breakthrough Award
and a $1,500 scholarship. The award was for Sarah's
discovery that living fungal spores and bacteria are
found in biomass smoke, including smoke that arrived
in Texas following a 2-day trip from Yucatan.
Sarah's discovery is very significant,
for it is standard agricultural practice to burn diseased
crops, plants and trees. Her findings reveal that this
practice needs careful scientific study.
You can read more about Sarah's discovery
at Smoke's
Surprising Secret, a NASA Earth Observatory web
site. Her discovery is also the subject of her first
scientific paper, Sarah A. Mims and Forrest M. Mims
III, Fungal spores are transported long distances in
smoke from biomass fires, Atmospheric Environment
38, 651-655, 2004.
Popular Mechanics was very
generous with Sarah. They flew Sarah, my wife Minnie
and your reporter to New York, put us in a nice hotel
and even treated us to a Broadway play. At the awards
ceremony, we met Logan Ward, the writer who wrote the
story
about Sarah in the November issue of Popular
Mechanics. We also met many of the editorial staff
at Popular Mechanics, including Editor-in-Chief
James B. Meigs and Deputy Editor Jerry Beilinson.
We also met someone I've long wanted
Minnie and Sarah to meet, Shawn Carlson. Shawn was one
of the judges of the Breakthrough Awards and was in
New York for the awards ceremony.
Shawn took us to breakfast the next
morning and accompanied us to an all too brief visit
to the American Museum of Natural History. While waiting
for the museum to open, we spent a very pleasant half
hour in Central Park while Shawn regaled us with stories
about time he spent there as a teenager many years ago.
Sarah's discovery was not made in a
lab using expensive equipment. Her initial discovery
was made with a $35 toy microscope and a package of
Petrifilms. The air sampler for her kite studies was
made from a plastic cup, microscope slide, two binder
clips and some string. Sarah's discovery demonstrates
that serious science can still be conducted using simple,
low-budget methods.
Forrest M. Mims III 
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