1997-98
NEW MEXICO
HIGH SCHOOL
SUPERCOMPUTING CHALLENGE
TEAM ABSTRACT
012
Aztec High School
Medicine and Health
To Tan, or Not To Tan...
For decades, it has been the style to be tan and brown. People have spent hours baking in the sun, and fortunes in high style salons just to achieve the so-called healthy glow. Not only has it become a trend, but for some people literally an obsession. Yet sunburn isn't the only consequence that we're dealing with. It has been proven conclusively, that ultrviolet rays from the sun are directly related to skin disorders, cancer and even death. In fact almost all of the 700,000 cases of non-melanoma skin cancer diagnosed each year in the United States are sun-related. But the question still remains how much sun is too much?
In a valiant endeavor to reach this long awaited answer, we have proposed a series of experiments that could be run on a supercomputer that would bring us a little closer to the solution. We will subject various unicellular and multicellular organisms to different times and to different amounts of unltaviolet light. By recording the results of these experiments we hope to simulate a human like environment within the program itself. By so doing we would be able to estimate the approximate amount of time that would be sagfe for an orgainism to be exposed to ultraviolet light.