Madison high-school student wins Intel prize

High-school senior Po-Ling Loh at Memorial High in Madison, Wisconsin, won a $20,000 scholarship for a project that could find use in security and cryptography applications.

She took 10th place in the Intel Science Talent Search for her project on "closed embeddings of finite groups in finite groups." The awards were handed out in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday to 40 U.S. high-school students.

Top prize of $100,000 went to a New York student for a device that detects toxic substances such as nerve gas.

Intel narrowed the field from 1,600 submissions. Second and third place were won with a way to measure the velocity of particles in an accelarator and research on DNA-binding proteins.