Health and Environment Major Concerns at Google Science Fair

Every year young scientist from all over the globe participate in Google Science Fair, that serves as an excellent platform for young minds to showcase their talent which aims at making a bigger impact on the world. The themes of these projects differ focusing on anything and everything. Google Science Fair is an online science competition sponsored by Google, Lego, CERN, National Geographic and Scientific American. 

This year's Google Science Fair noticed that the teens mainly focused on health and environmental issues which was clearly depicted through their projects.

Out of 2,000 young participants around the world, a few outstanding projects gained recognition and the young scientists were also awarded.

The grand prize winner Brittany Wenger, a 17 year old high school junior from Lakewood Ranch, Fla. gave rise to a new concept in the medical field. She showed how the doctors could treat breast cancer with a cloud based tool. She grabbed a prize of $ 50,000 for a scholarship, a trip to Galapagos Islands and an internship with one of the fair sponsors.

Wenger crafted an artificial neural network in the Google App Engine cloud that can be tailored and deployed immediately for diagnosing masts faster while being less invasive and more cost-effective.

Similar like Wenger on the medical technology front was, Catherine Wong, age 17 from Morristown, N.J., who designed a mobile phone comparable telemedicine system.  she developed a platform in which people can send EKG images to diagnosing heart disease using nothing more than Bluetooth on a feature phone.

Jonah Kohn from San Diegan, won the 13- to 14-year-old category, after he showed that the experience of music could be improved for the hard-of-hearing through tactile sound. He created a "multi-frequency tactile device" that breaks up the sound spectrum and then attaches to various parts of the user's body, literally making one's body a speaker.

Another interesting project focusing on environement was received from a Spanish trio who won the 15-16 age category for their environmental project 'La Vida Oculta del Agua (The Secret Life of Water)'. Iván Hervías Rodríguez, Marcos Ochoa and Sergio Pascual studied hidden microscopic life in fresh water. Google said they documented the organisms that exist in a drop of water, and how those organisms influence our environment.

Sumit Singh, age 15 (also competing in the 13-14 age from Lucknow, India, designed a vertical multi-level farming layout to increase crop yields while maintaining a more affordable farm.

Scientific American editor in chief Mariette Di Christina, who was among the judges trying to pick the best of projects said, "We've seen projects that are on the level of a science paper, we've seen projects that solve a practical problem by adapting an idea that has existed before."