New Delhi: Out of thousands of entries, only 15 projects made it to the finalists stage of the 2013 Google Science Fair.
One such project was of Viney Kumar, a 15-year-old from Australia, who developed an application that warns you when an ambulance or police vehicle is headed your way, so you can move out of the way quicker.
He imagines that one day, this kind of equipment will be in every car. He describes how it works:
An ERV updates its current location and route to a web service every 2 seconds. A target vehicle then translates this data into an audio visual format after periodically polling the same server. The system alerts the target vehicle with warnings at 800 and 500 metres to pull over- "Warning ERV within 500 metres : please pull over"
However, it was Eric Chen, a 17-year-old from California, who won the grand prize and got an additional $25,000 scholarship and a trip to the Galapagos with National Geographic. He presented a project to design new drugs to fight this deadly infection. He did so by finding compounds that turn off a viral protein called the "endonuclease."
He describes his project as such:
The emergence of new highly lethal influenza viruses such as H5N1 and H7N9 poses a grave threat to the world. My project is to discover novel influenza endonuclease inhibitors as leads for a new type of anti-flu medicine, effective against all influenza viruses including pandemic strains. By combining computer modeling and biological studies, I identified a number of novel, potent endonuclease inhibitors. I also performed comprehensive structural analysis, laying ground work for further design and optimization of the anti-flu drug candidates.
Ann Makosinski is a 16-year-old Canadian, also received an award as she designed a flashlight that runs solely off of body heat.
She describes her project:
Using four Peltier tiles and the temperature difference between the palm of the hand and ambient air, I designed a flashlight that provides bright light without batteries or moving parts. My design is ergonomic, thermodynamically efficient, and only needs a five degree temperature difference to work and produce up to 5.4 mW at 5 foot candles of brightness.
