Emily Rosa

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Emily Rosa, an American from Loveland, Colorado, is the youngest person ever (at 11 years old) to have a research paper accepted in a peer-reviewed medical journal -- the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The daughter of a registered nurse and an inventor, in 1996, at age 9, Rosa performed a study which debunked the claimed ability of 21 Therapeutic Touch practitioners to detect a Human Energy Field or aura.

To perform her blind study, Rosa had each of the TT practitioners put both of their hands through a screen, where Emily sat. She then flipped a coin as a sort of random number generator to choose which of the TT practitioner's hands she would put her hand next to, on the theory that if they could feel and manipulate a person's aura, then surely they could at least feel someone's aura when it was next to their hand. The results didn't go better than if they were merely guessing, showing that they could not feel her aura.

Her study was originally done for a school science fair when Rosa was 9, and she won a blue ribbon. An "astonished" American Medical Association then accepted her paper on the study for its journal; it was published in 1998 when she was 11. She also won the "Skeptic of the Year" award from the Skeptics Society, and an Ig Nobel Prize from the journal Annals of Improbable Research.