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Run by Society for Science, Regeneron Science Talent Search is a premier science and math competition for high-school seniors. One of the winners of this year is 17-year-oldE than Wong, who tries to improve existing technology. His focus: airplanes.

Nearly all planes have a tail. The tail keeps the plane's nose from suddenly changing direction during a turn. The structure adds stability but weighs the plane down. Tailless-designed airplane wings could serve the same function as the tail, as well as cutting the environmental cost of air travel. But there's a catch. Those wings must twist(弯曲) in a very precise way that makes them hard to produce.

Ethan became fascinated by this kind of airplane design when he saw a video of NASA's Prandtl-D aircraft gliding gracefully through the air without a tail. "I just thought that was really cool," says Ethan. He wondered if he could find a simpler way to achieve the same tailless flight.

"Essentially what I did was just trial and error," Ethan says. Using a computer model of an airplane wing, he adjusted the angle of twist along the wing until it could achieve tailless flight. Usually, such a wing requires a continuous distribution of wing twist. But he could achieve a similar effect with wings that had just a few sections of twist. "It's super easy to make," Ethan says.

In his garage, Ethan built model airplanes using rubber materials and packing tape totes this design. "Seeing the plane in the air was pretty cool," Ethan says. "It just flew really, really well."

Lighter, more efficient planes could open the door to other air travel innovations. "It's been a long-term goal of mine to build a solar plane that can fly through the day powered by solar panels on its wings," Ethan says. "It is absolutely possible for a really efficient plane."

To other teens who have big engineering ideas to explore, Ethan always says, "Don't ever give up." Even when some machinery feels impossible to understand, it help store member that the world's greatest inventors are only human, too. "Also, just make sure you love whatever you do," Ethan adds. "That'll make pursuing everything a lot easier."