Brigg loves to play chess, music, and soccer. He also enjoys collecting coins and corks. In the future, Brigg would love to become a rocket scientist because he says, "I've always loved the idea of flight."
Kyrillos has been involved in two school musicals and the Junior Honor Society. He likes to watch cooking shows and plans to take cooking classes in high school. Kyrillos's career goals include becoming a chemical engineer "to produce and patent a new substance."
When a forest fire ravaged a mountain near their homes in Tucson, Brigg and Kyrillos became interested in wildfire management. They found that the National Forest Service allows some burns to prevent worse fires from occurring. But they wondered whether the Forest Service should remove dead trees first. Brigg and Kyrillos hypothesized that the densest trees, having more mass, would release the most energy when burned. Hence, the Forest Service should remove some of those trees before a burn.
Brigg and Kyrillos cut 24 equal-volume blocks of soft maple, cherry, walnut, and jatoba wood. They burned three blocks of each for 10 minutes in a low-humidity chamber and then repeated the process with three blocks of each in higher humidity. As a heat source they used a paraffin candle, with the wood placed above it on a metal hardware cloth. This burning heated water stored in copper tubing, into which they had placed a thermometer. In low-humidity conditions, the least-dense wood burned the fastest, releasing the most energy during the 10-minute test. In humid conditions, the various woods released energy at roughly the same rate.
