Do you know there’s a disease that causes children to age at lightning speed? It’s called progeria, it afflicts about one in 4 million people and can cause a child to have the organs and body of a 30-year-old by the age of 3.

It’s a horrific disease, and you can thank Todd Beamer High School sophomore Davante Taylor for bringing it to your attention.

Taylor, along with over 200 of his Beamer classmates, got together Wednesday for the school’s fifth “Museum of Science” night. Groups of students picked scientific topics to research and presented their findings to the public. There were presentations on everything from obscure diseases, to earth science and green technology.

Taylor chose progeria to research after seeing the movie “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” He wanted to know if the main character’s condition — born an elderly man and ages backward until he dies as an infant — was real. He found just the opposite.

“I take life and look at it way differently,” he said of his reaction to learning about progeria. “At least I don’t have a syndrome that could take my life at any moment.”

Beamer science teacher Nicole Lien helped set up the museum. She explained that the museum was the culmination of the students’ research projects.

“We want to provide an opportunity for students to showcase their understanding and knowledge about science,” Lien said. “The students wrote research pers, now they’re presenting to the public what they’ve learned.”

Chemistry teacher Sarah Storm-Tower was oversaw admission to the museum. She handed out clipboards to members of the public who judged the students’ projects. Some judges were professional scientists from places like Weyerhaeuser and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Storm-Tower said that, looking back at her time in high school, the science fair projects she completed stand out.

“That’s why we feel it’s so important to maintain this tradition,” she said.

George Bechara is a research technician at Fred Hutchinson. He was invited to be a judge by a teacher. In his professional opinion, some projects were pretty intricate.

“Some of these kids are very dedicated,” he said.

Storm-Tower said there was approximately 107 different projects at the museum. The museum was held in Beamer’s Great Hall. There were tri-fold cardboard presentation boards as far as the eye could see, depicting research on things like schizophrenia, nuclear power, fish memory, evolution and forensics.

Freshman Lyuda Martynuk and sophomore Jose Gallegos studied a topic of local interest: earthquakes. Their presentation covered the different types of seismic waves in an earthquake (P and S waves), how earthquakes are located (triangulation) and the fact that the well-known Richter Scale is not actually widely used. Geologists more often use the Mercalli intensity scale.

Will the Puget Sound region see an earthquake anytime soon? Martynuk says no. Big ones happen every 200 to 300 years, and the 2001 Nisqually quake was pretty big. Plus, she said, the world’s biggest earthquakes occur in Japan, Iran and China.

It would not have been a science fair without a homemade volcano, with a vinegar and baking soda concotion in place of real lava. Freshmen Kyra Adams, Cassie Smith, Casey Woehrle, Nicole Bolf and Allison Reimeccius constructed a model of Mt. Rainier.

In the direct path of the lava flow was Seattle (and presumably Federal Way); a tiny statue of the Space Needle was no match for the students’ dyed-red baking soda-castic lahar.

But, they were not worried about a real eruption, explaining that Rainier blows its top only about every 330 years.