Image: Mashable, Karissa Bell
The answer to world hunger could lie in a single naturally-occurring bacteria.
That was the finding of this year's winning project at the Google Science Fair.
The goal of the annual event - now in its fourth year- is to give students round the world the opportunity to experiment with ambitious scientific ideas. And, of course, potentially change the world.
This year's competition saw thousands of teenage participants from around the world enter the online contest. The field was eventually narrowed to 18 finalists, representing 15 different projects in three different age groups.
Google hosted all 18 finalists Monday at its campus in Mountain View, Ca., where they showed off their projects to the panel of judges and hundreds of local students. The grand prize winner receives a $50,000 scholarship from Google, a grant for their school, and an expedition to the Galapagos Islands.
The winning project, came from three girls from Ireland who wanted to find out whether a naturally-occurring strain of bacteria could make certain crops more productive and increase food yields.
Though it sounds complicated (the full name of the project is Combating The Global Food Crisis: Diazotroph Bacteria as a Cereal Crop Growth Promoter), Emer Hickey, on of the three girls who worked on the project, says it's actually a fairly simple concept.
A lot of seeds rot in the soil before they can begin to grow, particularly in damp climates, she explained. Hickey and her classmates wanted to test whether a particular strain of bacteria would reduce this rot and ultimately lead to a higher production of food.
They found that when the seeds were treated with the bacteria, germination increased by 50%, which resulted in a 74% increase in the amount of dry food produced.
Image: Mashable, Karissa Bell
'We were actually learning all about the food crisis and how people are starving,' Hickey, 16, said. 'We thought why don't we try and help with the scientific way. We put two and two together and tired to do something and it happened to work.'
That 'happened to work' involved thousands of hours of work by Hickey and her two classmates, Ciara Judge and Sophie Healy-Thow. Together the three girls spent more than 11 months rigorously testing more than 10,000 seeds.
Theirs wasn't the only project attempting to tackle a global problem though. Other entrants set out to create a paint that could absorb air pollution, a device that can help the disabled translate breaths into speech, a new method for cleaning waste from oil sands and a Chrome extension to prevent cyberbullying- all taken on by kids as young as 13.
With ambitions like those, it's hard not wonder why Google- a company long known for its innovative and outside-the-box approach to solving problems- is investing in the ideas of teenagers.
Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments. Entities 0 Name: Google Count: 3 1 Name: Hickey Count: 3 2 Name: Karissa Bell Count: 2 3 Name: Google Science Fair Count: 1 4 Name: Galapagos Islands Count: 1 5 Name: Mountain View Count: 1 6 Name: Diazotroph Bacteria Count: 1 7 Name: Ca. Count: 1 8 Name: Ireland Count: 1 9 Name: Ciara Judge Count: 1 10 Name: Emer Hickey Count: 1 11 Name: Sophie Healy-Thow Count: 1 Related 0 Url: http://ift.tt/XRaa8H Title: For those who dream big: Announcing the winners of the 2014 Google Science Fair Description: Ciara Judge, Émer Hickey and Sophie Healy-Thow became interested in addressing the global food crisis after learning about the Horn of Africa famine in 2011. When a gardening project went awry, they discovered a naturally occurring bacteria in soil called Diazotroph.
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