Connor enjoys fishing, camping, snowboarding, and soccer because they allow him to have fun with his friends outside of school. He is interested in a career as a food scientist because "cooking is like one nonstop experiment."
When Connor came across a dollar bill with "Where's George?" stamped on it in red as part of a tracking study, he got an idea to apply this concept to the illegal drug trade. He interviewed a detective in the Michigan State Police and found out that police often test money for drug residue. Connor lives in a rural part of Michigan. He hypothesized that urban money would test positive for cocaine more often than rural money and that older bills would test positive more than newer ones.
Connor recruited his parents and uncles to gather money of various denominations from stores and gas stations in urban and rural Michigan. He conducted 73 tests on these bills, wiping them with cobalt thiocyanate. If the wipe turned a blue color, the bill was positive for cocaine. Fresh new bills from banks served as controls for the test's accuracy. He found that 73 percent of the urban bills tested positive, compared with 42 percent of the rural bills. Bills in circulation the longest were more likely to test positive than newer bills.
