In as much as Warren Buffet and Bill Gates have joined philanthropic forces to produce a $60 billion+ foundation to provide grants for worthwhile educational, humanitarian, medical, and civilization-advancing purposes, I will follow their truly magnificent and magnanimous actions by describing several somewhat more modest high school student grant activities that I am familiar with.

In the 1960s when I started a research course at Garden City High, I encouraged my students to apply for high school science grants that were being offered, first by the William and Sophia Casey Foundation and later by Henry Fox, president of Good-Weather, Inc. Over the next few years, approximately 120 of the ones who sent in individual or joint applications with other students were awarded grants for their projects.

Grant projects included correlating seasonal light and temperature changes with February phytoplankton population explosions and subsequent October population collapses in Hempstead Harbor and Long Island Sound. Phytoplankton are microscopic floating algae that constitute the base of aquatic food cycles. They are consumed by marine animals ranging from protozoa to filter-feeding whales. They live in sunlit surface waters to be able to photosynthesize, and they also need nutrients, which concentrate at the bottom after being formed by decomposition of dead organisms that had lived throughout the water column and sank after death.

Explosive phytoplankton increases were found to occur in February, when the surface waters are coldest and densest. The heavy surface waters sink and displace the bottom nutrient-bearing waters which rise to the surface where the dissolved nutrients are absorbed by phytoplankton, whose numbers can double every half-hour as long as nutrients and sufficient sunlight are available. The October collapses were correlated with insufficient sunlight due to low solar-ray angles and to reduced time between sunrise and sunset.

Another grant was for determining the wet and dry repose angles of sand and other sedimentary particles. Repose angles are maximum possible incline angles of loose particles. Because of friction-reducing lubrication, wet repose angles are lower than dry ones. Deaths can occur below beach cliffs and in sand and gravel pits when dry repose angles are exceeded by rainfall seepage and all material above the wet repose angle collapses and buries anyone at the cliff bottom. Sand's dry repose angle averages 32-33 degrees, but the saturated wet angle is 29-30 degrees.

Yet another project helped establish the high school roof as a Nassau County official particulate air pollution station. The first students were trained by County Health Department personnel. Students in following years were trained by those who had maintained the station during the previous year. Filters had to be removed, weighed to determine the bulk quantity of the collected particulates, and replaced on a six-day schedule, which necessitated measurements periodically on weekends. I had acquired a set of keys to give the students access to the roof on weekends when the school was closed, but I was eventually compelled to give it up. This didn't phase us. They never missed a scheduled measurement, because the students would climb up to the roof from the outside, get into my room via a window I would leave unlocked, weigh the old filter, and replace it before leaving.

Measuring refractive v. reflective mirage angles of concrete and asphalt roads to determine the cause of night mirages that involved headlights of approaching vehicles was another project. Using low-angle-measuring equipment, students roamed Garden City streets seeking suitable terrain to measure. Dodging traffic was merely a hazard that had to be dealt with- even though only low-traffic streets were used.

A project to determine negative behavioral patterns induced in normal population densities of guppies in fish tanks by increasing the densities to the maximum possible numbers compared similar human antisocial behavior in high-density urban areas.

A grant to measure the effects of oil spills on microorganisms in Manhasset Bay led to publication of a paper in a geological journal that subsequently was pirated and republished without permission in the Soviet Union. The journal's editor, my students, and I were all thrilled that the Soviets considered the Manhasset Bay article important.

Another grant was to determine whether Nobel prize-winner Irving Langmuir's Cyclogenesis theory that weather conditions in New Mexico could foretell weather conditions in New York was valid, (it wasn't). But a 14-month project to measure the effects of meteor showers on world precipitation patterns found that the Bowen Theory by an Australian scientist (who had been derided by his contemporaries) turned out to be correct. The lead student co-author of the resulting publication was invited to attend a NASA rocket launch at Cape Canaveral.