17-year-old Pakistani student's visual presentation of 'electric honeycomb' garners international praise

Muhammad Shaheer Niazi, a 17-year-old Pakistani boy, has garnered praise for his visualisation of a phenomenon, known to physicists for decades, which can help engineers develop technology for printing, heating or biomedicine, The New York Times reported on Thursday.

As one of the first Pakistanis to participate in the International Young Physicists’ Tournament, Niazi replicated and provided a visualisation of an electric honeycomb, the NYT reported.

An electronic honeycomb is "what happens when certain kinds of electrically charged particles travel between a pointy electrode and a flat one but bump into a puddle of oil along the way," the NYT said.

"Its what happens as natural forces work to keep an electric charge moving in an interrupted circuit."

Presenting his work as any professional scientist would, Niazi provided photographic evidence of charged ions creating the honeycomb, the NYT added.

Niazi's work was published in Royal Society Open Science, a journal that publishes research in the fields of Mathematics, Engineering and Science.

“I think it’s outstanding for so young a scientist to reproduce these results,” NYT quoted Dr Alberto T. Pérez Izquierdo, a physicist at the University of Seville in Spain, as saying about Niazi's project.

Dr Izquierdo's 1997 work on the subject inspired Niazi’s project, the daily said.