Tara won third place for her popcorn experiment. Her hypothesis proved incorrect, but that's not a bad thing in science. Finding and fixing errors in thinking is the name of the game.
A goal, and a skill, is to propose testable ideas, such that experiment brings one closer to an answer, perhaps by suggesting additional experiments.
Science is also about dreaming up streamlining heuristics which organize what's known into mnemonic devices (e.g. search engines), facilitating faster lookup and application. Or maybe that's more the job of engineering?
In any case, knowledge is more valuable when it's retrievable when and where you need it. A lot of good science gets buried and/or ignored, only to be rediscovered much later. That's wasteful.
Science also gets locked away by those hoping to use it to private advantage -- or maybe just to keep competitors from using it.
One reason Bucky was such a control freak regarding his intellectual property was to frustrate bureaucracies, public or private, that might wish to keep it secret.
By retaining the freedoms and privileges of ownership, Fuller was able to pioneer an open source strategy on behalf of omnihumanity.
