Ok my deadline is almost here 
and I need a high school or higher level science project idea. It has to have an application and measurable variables. Anything would be appreciated.
Why not build a time machine, go back in time to when you were given your assignment, and start working on it?
RussellM
Bart Simpson’s science project still slays me: He puts a potato in a bowl of dirt, looks in on it every now and then and says, “Hmm, still a potato.”
Millhouse’s is even better:
STEP 1: Buy a slinky.
STEP 2: Elevate a plank to an inadequate height
STEP 3: “Behold the wonders of gravity!”
STEP 4: Get F
Delineate wetlands near your school/home.
Track the path of the moon across the sky…locate the ecliptic.
Track the daily routes of neighborhood male cats.
Calculate the variation in the volume of CO2 generated over a day by traffic on your town’s main street.
Plot the broadcast radius of a radio station’s signal. Calculate the strength of the signal.
good luck!
Well… speaking as the father of two geniuses who conceived and worked out their first place science projects over the years all by [cough…cough] themselves I might have an idea or two for some simple projects that can be finished quickly.
First Place crowd pleasers
1: Effect of wing angle on lift
sturdy gram postage scale
study model glider wing
protractor
powerful fan or fixed angle hair dryer on cool depending on how big wing is
2: Gauge strength of 6 different fishing line brands
container with handle
fishing line all same test 6-8 lbs max
weight lifting plates and a lot of pennies
tie line to handle add weights then pennies until breaks - add bucket weight + plate + penny weight (gram scale again) to get total
3: Effects of adding memory to starting and running Office Suite applications
Go from 32 to 256 megs on common platform and time app tasks with digital stopwatch
I cannot stress enough how important a neat and glossy presentation is. Top quality formboard - not cardboard - digital photos of all aspects of the process - a clever title - source bibliography (many forget this) - neat smooth pasteup use gluestick on back of paper - NO TAPE - all text to be inkjet or laser - only handwriting to be result tabulation -3-D color graphs are a real crowd pleaser. Lastly if you can foamtape or sturdily affix some flat non-breakable interesting object that was part of the experiment to the board (fishing lure-wing-memory chip) this is a real bonus. Chekc your specific rules for applicability.
Having said all this there was one really skanky little presentation that still got a first place ribbon last year because it was so clever. A young lady, whose father was IIRC a Lockheed engineer, somehow measured the speed of light/radio waves using (I kid you not!) brownies in a microwave and some equation that measured the frequency of … mumble mumble… and related it to the … mumble mumble (anyway it seemed really interesting) maybe some hard science type will remember how this is done.
My “Honorable Mention” 7th grade science project was growing plants (I can’t remember what kind I used) under different colors of light and seeing which grew best. Still wish I could have found a green filter–all I had was yellow, red, and purple.
My “Honorable Mention” 8th grade science project involved putting minnows in the freezer for X minutes and gradually bringing them back up to room temperature. I wish I’d paid more attention to the rate of cooling and warming–that was probably the deciding factor.
But hey, any exhibit with live (and dead) fish is going to attract attention.
orion007, join the club! I’ve spent the last week coming up with ideas for my thesis. I thought about asking the Dopers, too, but I think I’ve got it sussed now. Phew!
Anyway, two of my best science projects (both medal winning, yippee) which I did at school were building a telegraph and an oscilloscope out of everyday materials. But I think you’ll appreciate my crappiest project (which somehow got a fantastic grade) – one that can really be whipped up last minute too. My partner and I took a few squares of cardboard, smeared them with vaseline, and hung them in various areas (at least 6 ft high) around the city and suburbs. A week or two later we collected them and counted all the dirt on them, and called it a measure of air pollution.
Wanna hear the most pathetic part? I did the first two projects in 3rd and 4th grade respectively, and the third (crappy) project in 11th grade. (Needless to say, my thesis will not continue this trend. :))
Sorry, 4th and 5th grade, not 3rd and 4th. Slightly less pathetic. 
Oh, those were yours? My friends and I used to throw dirt at those things. 
Phobos, sadly, after seeing the state of some of the ones hanging downtown, you would think that someone had chucked dirt at them. But…no. The air really was THAT dirty. (We know because they were hung in trusted friends’ yards.)
I keep trying to get my kids to do this one, but no takers yet. Develop scientific tests for various sayings. For example:
A rolling stone gathers no moss.
You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
The early bird catches the worm.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
A pint’s a pound the world around.
The proof is in the pudding.
I used to have a whole list of these. Thought with a sense of humor the experiiment could be scientifically valid and entertaining as all hell. Got tired of my kids’ exasperated, “Oh daddy!”
I get the others, but how would you do these? 16 fluid ounces is a pint–where’s the mystery? And geometry proofs done in tapioca?
Here’s a decent idea…
Make a simple chemical battery with lemon and measure the variation in voltage caused by different range of temperatures.
The lemon battery is easy enough, you just stick a piece of zinc in one end as the anode (a zinc nail from the hardware store should do) and a piece of copper in the other end as the cathode (a bit of exposed copper wire would be fine). Then attach them to a simple voltmeter (Radio Shack makes a nice swinging-needle battery tester for about $12 with two nice wire leads).
Measure the voltage produced by the “battery” in a bunch of different temperature ranges (room temperature, in the fridge, on top of your clothes dryer, etc.) while keeping track of the temperature via a thermometer stuck in the lemon. Afterwards you can make a nice graph showing the relation and variation (hint: the colder, the less voltage).
Good luck.
A rolling stone gathers no moss.
Cant be true, someone told me Mick Jagger was an avid Lichen collector !
Do some research in replication of previous results. I did some research last year regarding the effects of EDTA upon Acanthameoba a. as a model Giardia l. I used microscopy with a Trypan Blue dye. Want a chace to back me up here?
P.S. The chicks are ALL OVER the science researchers. Trust me on this one…
I think I have an idea how that experiment was done: First, you use the brownies to find the “hot spots” and “cold spots” in the microwave. This gives you the resonances, and hence, the wavelength of the microwaves used by the oven. Then, you approximate the frequency as being one of the resonances of water molecules, which is how microwave ovens heat things. Speed = frequency times wavelength.
Also be sure you know what the regulations are for science projects at your school. When I was doing science projects, they had gotten so lawsuitphobic that we weren’t allowed to do any experiments involving:
[ul][li]Live animals[/li][li]Flammable liquids[/li][li]Any flame, regardless of fuel[/li][li]Anything we made that plugged into a wall outlet[/li][li]Any decomposing material, or[/li][li]Any caustic or corrosive substance[/ul][/li]which, unfortunately, eliminates many of the good suggestions posted here. In addition, our display could not include any liquids of any sort, including water.
Some of my best projects included plans for a human-powered helicopter, a robot that solved mazes, and the effect of wing angle on plane stability. Electronics projects work well, too, and baking soda-vinegar volcanoes and balloon rockets are always favorites of the judges, for some unfathomable reason.
Nimue, when you made your oscilliscope, what did you use for a screen?
One that came up in conversation the other day (NO! don’t bother to ask!):
Effects of capsaicin on sperm motility.
This may be too elaborate, but: Obtain some terrariums and sheets of ~1/4" plastic to go over the top. For each terrarium, drill two holes in the plastic and insert a cheap pressure guage in one of them and an air-tight valve in the other (available in scientific supply houses, or, like everything else I’m sure, on the net). Now put dirt in the terrarium and plant some seeds of three or four different types of plants well spaced; glue the plastic on as a lid with the best marine sealant you can find. Now pressurize the terraria with CO2 to different atmospheric pressures and CO2 concentrations. Repressurize them every day (to keep the gas mixture proportions fairly consistent over time). Don’t forget to keep one tank open to the air as a control. I’m not sure where you could get a tank of CO2, but I’m sure your local hospital or university can tell you, and I’m sure it’s fairly cheap. Surgical supply houses MIGHT have them. I’m guessing the overall cost of the project should be under $100 if you play your cards right.
Collect the data: time to germination, rates of growth (glue a scale all along the back of the terrarium), etc., and if you want to get fancy you could do some simple paper chromatography to check chlorophyll levels.
If you find a correlation with CO2, great. But the nice thing is, even if you don’t, you can still draw conclusions about the ability (or lack thereof) of flora biomass to compensate for increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere (greenhouse effect implications).
This project can be very simple or very elaborate, should be fairly cheap, has timely results (greenhouse effect being in the news), and the data collection and interpretation is fairly easy. The hardest technical skill required is gluing (and finding and bargaining for used terraria - make sure they are still water and air tight).