Science fair winners taking home the gold.

Students will be traveling the globe and traveling to college with scholarships won at the 47th International Science and Engineering Fair, held in Tucson last week.

The 665 winners were selected from 1,071 high school students representing more than 40 countries. They took home prizes totaling over $1 million. The four top awards were overseas trips. Students also won first- through fourth-place awards, sponsored by six corporations, of up to $5,000 in 16 different categories. Science Service, Inc., publisher of Science News, organizes the annual fair.

Two students won the Glenn T. Seaborg Nobel Prize Visit Award and plan to travel to Stockholm in December to observe the 1996 Nobel ceremonies. Naomi Sue Bates, 18, of Franklin (W.Va.) High School, used a 140-foot telescope to detect high-velocity gas in galaxies where none had been seen before. She hopes her work will shed further light on star and galaxy formation. Bates was also a Westinghouse Science Talent Search scholarship winner (SN: 3/16/96, p.167).

Cowinner John Paul Tassinari, 17, of Braintree (Mass.) High School designed an airfoil that minimizes drag from air pressure, while increasing lift. A higher lift-to-drag ratio improves an aircraft's takeoff on short runways, climbing rate, and fuel efficiency. He tested his design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's wind tunnel.

The team of Mark Mason Esformes, 18, and Jason Adam Gerstenberger, 17, of Manatee High School in Bradenton, Fla., won a trip to the 11th International Fair of South America in Novo Hamburgo, Brazil. The students designed a computer program that attempted to simulate the activity of viruses and their interaction with immune cells.

For its research on kayak design, a team from Hawaii won a trip to the European Union Contest for Young Scientists in Helsinki. Team members are David James Matsumoto, 16, Marvin Taichi Kawabata, 18, and Christopher Chi Yuen To, 16, all of Saint Louis School in Honolulu.

Research on the behavioral and physiological responses of earthworms, fruit flies, and fire ants to high concentrations of pesticides won Katherin Marie Slimak, 17, of West Springfield (Va.) High School a scholarship to the Bessie Lawrence International Summer Science Institute at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.