Judy Dutton read a NYT article about a kid who was trying to train Madagascar Cockroaches in hopes of proving that they could be used as drug-sniffing-roaches instead of drug-sniffing dogs, and she was so surprised when he didn't place in the national science fair that she set out to find out why. This book-- with one chapter per project-- contains the answer to her question, which is basically that there were better projects out there. It also contains some of the most interesting science writing I've read in a very long time. My favorites are the story about the girl who taught her autistic cousin how to talk; the one aobut another girl who figured out a new and really cheap way to tell if(/that) DuPont was polluting the water in her town; and the Navajo boy who built a solar water heater for his house out of a radiator (didn't win, did get a scholarship to a much better school than the one he was at).
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