Prize

North County High School freshman Jack Andraka stood on the auditorium stage, speaking about the invention that earned him the $75,000 grand prize at the recent Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. Behind him stood Dr. Anirban Maitra, a professor in the Johns Hopkins University's department of pathology who gave Jack use of his lab to craft his invention, a cheap and effective "dipstick-sensor" method of testing blood or urine to identify early-stage pancreatic cancer and other diseases.

North County High School freshman Jack Andraka stood on the auditorium stage, speaking about the invention that earned him the $75,000 grand prize at the recent Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. Behind him stood Dr. Anirban Maitra, a professor in the Johns Hopkins University's department of pathology who gave Jack use of his lab to craft his invention, a cheap and effective "dipstick-sensor" method of testing blood or urine to identify early-stage pancreatic cancer and other diseases.

Special prizes will be given throughout the evening to all players at the Laurel Boys and Girls Club Holiday Bingo. Doors open at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, Dec. 19 at the Phelps Center, 701 Montgomery St. The bingo includes a guaranteed $500 bonanza game. Prizes include electronics, kitchen items and jewelry. The kitchen will offer reasonably priced food. For information, call 240-264-6642.

As a child, Kathryn Manion used to sit on her father's lap late into the evenings and read with him. That, said her father, Jim Manion, didn't last long. "She quickly began to read on her own," he said, adding jokingly, "I guess we weren't reading fast enough. " Not nearly. Tuesday night in New York City, Washington College senior and Clarksville native Kathryn Manion received Washington College's Sophie Kerr Prize for her body of short stories and other creative work. At more than $58,000 this year, it is considered the most lucrative undergraduate literary award in the country.

Baltimore must be a very generous place, because just about everybody who was asked said they'd share the $242 million Mega-Million lottery prize if they happened to be the lucky winner in Friday night's drawing. However, no one won Friday night's drawing, so the prize will be $290 million on Tuesday. The estimated cash out payment is $182.6 million. But on Friday, Rick Tamborine, who was busy selling lottery tickets at the Royal Farms in Hampden, said, "I'd take a trip to the moon" if he won. He'd purchased $20 worth himself.

When Brandon E. Hopkins was named the winner yesterday of Washington College's lucrative Sophie Kerr Prize, and his friends started cheering, "I just totally blanked out," he recalled afterward. "It was sensory overload. It's a rush."Hopkins, a 21-year-old senior from Frederick, won $29,300 -- America's largest undergraduate literary prize.He was chosen in part for a novel he began writing last year about a university student who finds love, makes a literary pilgrimage to Paris, and faces a difficult reunion with his father.

The jackpot in tomorrow night's Maryland Lotto drawing has been increased to $3 million after Wednesday's drawing failed to produce a winner.The numbers drawn Wednesday night were 07, 14, 19, 23, 27, 36.Lottery spokeswoman Theresa Gutierrez said 39 people correctly matched five of the six numbers. They will collect $756 each.Another 1,732 bettors matched four of the six numbers drawn Wednesday night. Each of their tickets is worth $28.=1 Lotto sales for the drawing totaled $736,475.

I wanted to use your name on this, but the South Carolina Department of Juvenile Justice asked me not to. Maybe you'll recognize yourself from the following description. You are 16. You are confined to a juvenile detention center. You were convicted of public disorderly conduct and "assault and battery of a high and aggravated nature." And Stacey Haynes has taken a special interest in you. She's a federal prosecutor who told me about you when I visited Columbia, S.C., last month to give a speech.

A Las Vegas, Nev., company that lured Marylanders with the prospect of a "millionaire's treasure" must part with some of its own under an agreement reached with the state attorney general's office.The company, Honeywell & Roberts Inc., which sponsors prize contests, has agreed to stop sending "deceptive solicitations" to Maryland residents and will pay $16,175 into a restitution fund for Marylanders who sent illegal "judging fees" to the company, Attorney General J. Joseph Curran Jr. announced yesterday.

CHESTERTOWN -- A 21-year-old Eastern Shore native picked up a check for $55,907 at Washington College yesterday - the nation's richest undergraduate writing award. And if Marshall Shord Jr. wasn't too stunned to listen to keynote commencement speaker Chris Matthews, he heard some advice for spending at least part of his winnings. The political talk show host urged graduates to take risks in their 20s, while they are young and the consequences of their mistakes are fewer. Shord, a low-key English major from Ocean Pines, said his professors had primed him for graduate school, but with the Sophie Kerr Prize in hand he might consider taking a break from the academic world, "the only environment I've ever really been in."

Kathryn Manion was "at a loss for words" Tuesday night — shortly after being honored for her way with them. At a private club in New York, Manion, 22, was named the 2012 winner of Washington College's Sophie Kerr Prize, which at more than $58,000 this year is considered the most lucrative undergraduate literary award in the country. The senior English major, a Clarksville native and graduate of Notre Dame Prep in Towson, said late Tuesday that her win was still sinking in, but that she was honored.

The thrill of potentially winning big bucks gets people to spend millions of dollars regularly on lottery tickets. Can this same concept excite Marylanders to become better savers? We'll find out. A new law that kicks in next month will allow banks and credit unions here to offer raffles with cash prizes as a way to promote savings. Michigan's credit unions launched a similar campaign a few years ago, and thousands of depositors have managed so far to save tens of millions of dollars.

For the first time since 1977, the Pulitzer Prize Board has not chosen a winner in the fiction category. Susan Larson, one of three fiction jurors who each read 300 submissions prior to forwarding three finalists, announced that the jurors were "shocked," "angry," and "very disappointed. " She added that the jurors felt so strongly about all three finalists — "Swamplandia!" by Karen Russell, "The Pale King" by David Foster Wallace, and "Train Dreams" by Dennis Johnson — that they would have been happy had any been selected.

The Baltimore Sun was named Newspaper of the Year — and recognized as having the best website among the competitors — Friday in the annual Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Press Association awards contest. The Sun has been chosen Newspaper of the Year six times in the past seven years. The Washington Post won the award in 2008. The Sun won 51 first- or second-place awards in the editorial contest among daily papers with a circulation of 75,000 or more; The Post won 13; The News Journal, based in Wilmington, Del., won 11. Twelve of the Sun's 27 first-place award winners were also considered Best in Show, meaning they were superior to the first-place winners from the five other circulation divisions.

A half-dozen artists, ranging from a sculptor specializing in what he calls "tombstones for a cemetery that has turned carnival" to a photographer focusing on abandoned spaces and objects, have been announced as finalists for this year's $30,000 Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize. Finalists for the seventh annual prize, awarded to an artist living and working in the Greater Baltimore area, are: Lisa Dillin , a Silver Spring native raised in the Annapolis area whose interdisciplinary work stems from her interest in what organizers termed "the psychology of the contemporary individual contrasted with that of the primitive one. " She is on the adjunct faculty of the Corcoran College of Art + Design and American University inWashington, D.C. Jonathan Duff , who will be receiving his master's degree in fine arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art 's Mount Royal School of Art in May, is a 2008 graduate of the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota whose sculptures and paintings have been exhibited throughout the Minneapolis area.

The 2012 Pulitzer Prizes award today had a big gap -- there was no winner in the fiction category, which must have ticked off a whole lot of marketing execs. What will they do with all the "Winner of the Pulitzer Prize" stickers they had printed up for their covers? The finalists were not a shoddy bunch: "Train Dreams" by Denis Johnson, "Swamplandia!" by Karen Russell and "The Pale King," by the late David Foster Wallace.  Other highly acclaimed novels of 2011 would have been worthy winners, too. Among them: "The Art of Fielding" by Chad Harbach and "The Tiger's Wife" by Téa Obreht.

Students at Arundel High School have received their prize of a rock concert for winning a food-drive contest sponsored by an area radio station. The band Good Charlotte performed Friday for hundreds of students in the Gambrills school's auditorium as their prize in the WHFS-FM Capital Area Food Drive. The Arundel High Key Club, with help from its club counterparts at several other schools, ran a campaign that collected 4.5 tons of nonperishable items during six school days in early November.

on the job hanah.cho@baltsun.com Since Towson University's The Apprentice-like competition began four years ago, it has provided the winning contestant a full-time gig with a Baltimore-area employer. Executives playing the Donald Trump role have included Ed Hale, chairman and chief executive of First Mariner Bank; Frank Bramble, a director at Bank of America; Jonathan Murray, senior vice president at The Murray Group of UBS Financial; and John Tolmie, president and CEO of St. Joseph Medical Center.

Kevin Puts, a composer who teaches at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, won the Pulitzer Prize in music Monday for his first opera. Puts, a member of the Peabody faculty since 2006, was honored for "Silent Night," a two-act work commissioned by the Minnesota Opera. "I'm still in a state of shock, and I'm trying to get my bearings," the composer said from Minneapolis, where "Silent Night" premiered in November. "It is an enormous thrill. " The opera was inspired by the 2005 film "Joyeux Noel," about the unofficial cease-fire that emerged spontaneously during Christmas 1914, when British, French and German troops socialized during a brief respite before the trench warfare resumed.

The holder of the winning Mega Millions ticket purchased at a Baltimore County convenience store stepped forward Monday to claim the prize, officials said. Maryland Lottery spokeswoman Carole Everett did not identify the winner, who will share the largest lottery prize in history. Everett said the winner will remain anonymous, but lottery officials plan to share a "story line" with the public during a news conference Tuesday morning. A Westport woman drew international attention last week when she said she had bought one of the three winning tickets sold nationwide in the $656 million drawing on March 30. Mirlande Wilson, a mother of seven who emigrated from Haiti, could not immediately be reached for comment Monday evening.