H2prO - Portable Photocatalytic Electricity Generation and Water Purification Unit

Electricity and clean water -things that we easily have access to are unfortunately luxuries for those in underdeveloped countries.

In fact, not only is there a lack of resources in third-world countries, but also the whole world is facing energy crisis and water pollution. My objective is to find an eco-friendly and economical approach to solve both issues.

My device H2PRO relies on photocatalytic reactions to purify and sterilize wastewater and to generate electricity using hydrogen produced. This sustainable process only requires titania and light. What’s more is that organic pollutant doesn’t only get decomposed but will also enhance the reaction rate.

   
 


It is composed of 2 parts

• –the upper unit for photocatalytic water-purification and hydrogen-generation, which is connected to a fuel cell and 
• the bottom unit for further water filtration.

H2PRO’s feasibility in the removal of organic pollutant was examined to be excellent-almost 90% of organic compound was decomposed after 2 hours. However, its performance in electricity generation was quite unstable although theoretically and experimentally the photocatalytic hydrogen yield is proved to be satisfactory and even better in the presence of organic pollutant. I will keep improving this device until stable electricity generation is achieved.

In conclusion, I have successfully introduced a design for a portable electricity-generation and water-purification unit. Generally speaking, H2PRO has demonstrated its potential to feasibly provide clean water and sustainable energy to the needy ones. I will keep "practicalizing" the electricity-generation unit so that people can really benefit from my design one day.






Question / Proposal

Is it possible to create a portable device that purifies wastewater while generating electricity sustainably and affordably?
This question is raised not only because of the lack of clean water and electricity in third-world countries, but also because we are all facing energy crisis and water pollution. My objective is to find an eco-friendly and economical approach to solve both issues.

Based on what I developed from investigating photocatalysis, I aim to create a device that can put the mechanisms into practice. In photocatalysis, not only water is purified and sterilized, but hydrogen is also produced through water-splitting, which can be used to generate electricity.
The entire sustainable process only needs titania and light-no additional power source is required. However, hydrogen production is generally low since photoexcited electrons tend to fall back to the hole(i.e.photoinduced electron-hole combination). Fortunately, it can be overcome by adding reductants, while some organic pollutants serve such purpose. Hence, I propose to combine the two mechanisms together to enhance the yield and lower the cost of hydrogen generation, meanwhile efficient water purification can also be achieved.

There are similar designs existing, but they require either an excessively complex use of technology or an external energy source, which means they are not sustainable, affordable and manageable for users in underdeveloped countries. Nonetheless, I hypothesize that photocatalysis can be applied in a manageable scale that allows water purification and electricity production to be economically and sustainably performed in a portable device as well as at a household level.

ORIGINAL: Google Science Fair

Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai among winners of 2013 UN human rights prize

5 December 2013 – A well-known Pakistani student activist and an anti-slavery campaigner from Mauritania are among the winners of the 2013 United Nations Human Rights Prize, it was announced today.

The Prize, which is bestowed every five years, is an honorary award given to individuals and organizations in recognition of outstanding achievement in human rights. Previous recipients include Amnesty International and former presidents Jimmy Carter and Nelson Mandela.

“The Prize is an opportunity not only to give public recognition to the achievements of the recipients themselves, but also to send a clear message to human rights defenders the world over that the international community is grateful for, and supports, their tireless efforts to promote all human rights for all,” stated a news release issued by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

The six winners announced today are:  

• Biram Dah Abeid of Mauritania, a son of freed slaves who works to eradicate the heinous practice; 
• Hiljmnijeta Apuk of Kosovo, a campaigner for the rights of people with disproportional restricted growth (short stature); 
• Liisa Kauppinen of Finland, President emeritus of the World Federation of the Deaf; 
• Khadija Ryadi, Former President of the Morocco Association for Human Rights; 
• Mexico’s Supreme Court of Justice (the Constitutional Court); and 
• Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl who was shot by the Taliban for attending classes and is now a renowned education activist.

Malala Yousafzai. UN Photo/JC McIlwaine

The award ceremony will take place at UN Headquarters in New York on 10 December 2013, as part of the annual commemoration of Human Rights Day, which will this year include the observance of the 20th anniversary of the creation of OHCHR and the adoption of the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action.

Among the events in Geneva today to mark the 20th anniversary was a discussion on issues such as the balance between security and privacy online, and a performance by musician Salif Keita of Mali, who was born with albinism and has been working to raise awareness about this condition.

In her opening remarks today, High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay underscored the significance of the two documents adopted at the World Conference on Human Rights, held in the Austrian capital in 1993.

“The Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action crystallized the principle that human rights are universal. It committed States to the promotion and protection of all human rights for all people, regardless of their political, economic and cultural systems,” she stated.

“Today, human rights are increasingly permeating all corners of the work of the United Nations, and that is fundamentally changing the way the United Nations works with national authorities and the international community.

“The key now is to implement the laws and standards to make enjoyment of human rights a reality on the ground. Unfortunately, too often, the political will, and the human and financial resources, to achieve this are lacking.”

The High Commissioner said the 20 years since Vienna have seen many setbacks and a number of tragic failures to prevent atrocities and safeguard human rights. “In several instances where deplorable, large-scale violations of international human rights law were occurring, the international community was too slow, too divided, too short-sighted – or just plain inadequate in its response to the warnings of human rights defenders and the cries of victims.

“We can and we must do better,” she stressed. “The Vienna Declaration should be viewed as a blueprint for a magnificent construction that is still only half built. It should be viewed as a living document that can and should continue to guide our actions and goals.”

ORIGINAL: UN

Two young scientists break down plastics with bacteria

Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao have identified a new bacteria that breaks down nasty compounds called phthalates, common to flexible plastics and linked to health problems. And they’re still teenagers.

Why you should listen to them:
After a visit to a plastic-filled waste transfer station last year, students Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao learned that much of the plastic in trash may not degrade for 5,000 years. Synthesized into plastics are phthalates, compounds that make shower curtain liners, food wraps and other products bendable but may also adversely impact human reproductive development and health. As plastics slowly break down, these phthalates would leach into the surrounding environment.

So, the two young scientists tackled the problem and ultimately discovered strains of bacteria that have the potential to naturally degrade phthalates. Their work earned a regional first place in British Columbia for the 2012 Sanofi BioGENEius Challenge Canada, as well as a special award for the most commercial potential at the contest’s finals.

"[Wang and Yao] came up with the research idea and the underlying experimental design, which is remarkable for such young people."

Lindsay Eltis, University of British Columbia, The Vancouver Sun 5/3/2012

Speakers Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao: Science fair winners

Teenage Girl Develops App to Help the Blind

“The fact that I’m the only girl interested in my high school going to these hackathons is really sad. Maitreyee Joshi, senior at Lynbrook High, has a deep passion for building technologies that help the physically and mentally disabled people.

“The fact that I’m the only girl interested in my high school going to these hackathons is really sad". 

Maitreyee Joshi, senior at Lynbrook High, has a deep passion for building technologies that help the physically and mentally disabled people.

For example, while working at Stanford Research Labs, she built a head controlled quadcopter in order to facilitate movement for her professor’s mute quadriplegic friend. Also, for last year’s science fair project, she wrote an biclustering algorithm that found DNA mutations that caused a brain tumor called Glioblastoma Multiforme.

Currently, Maitreyee is focusing her attention on the blind. With the popularity and spur of iPhone apps being developed, she thought over the summer of how she could use the same to build a systemized technology for the blind. It wasn’t long till she was able to build an iPhone game app that helped blind people develop their spatial skills and navigate through new environments. Testing it out with the blind proved to be a surprised. After playing the game only twice they were able to map out the entire building they were in.

It was with this that Maitreyee knew that she was onto something, and decided that she would develop it further along. Maitreyee is a rarity amongst other girls in her high school in which she is an aspiring tech engineer and interested in things like robotics and hackathons. Although, she is aware that being interested in tech has that nerdy connotation, Maitreyee is thankful that she goes to a high school which is academically focused and welcomes similar and more students like her.

But, as she has admitted several times, the experience of being sometimes the only girl interested in tech in her high school can be quite frustrating.

“I wish that I had more friends that are girls that can come along with me to these hackathons. Most of the time I’m with a group of guys all the time, which can get really annoying and sometimes drive you away.”

Maitreyee also recalls a similar experience when she was working on a robotics club in school.

“I would have loved it if the girls on the team were more actively involved in things other than public relations or marketing.”

However, with women like Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg, Maitreyee is excited at the prospect of being the only femgineer in her high school, which she believes makes her unique and a crusader as well.

“I feel like I’m a fighter going against social conventions, which excites me.”

As Maitreyee begins to scale her iPhone app. she is beginning to learn early lessons and dilemmas that other engineers in startups face which is stepping outside the building.

Before finding success with testing out the app with blind people, Maitreyee was showing signs of disinterest and was continually doubting that the app would work at all. What made it even worse was that she had a meeting with one of the Accessible Technology instructors at the Silicon Valley Blind Center.

“I was scared about showing him my prototype, and that it wouldn’t be good enough.”

Maitreyee was so scared that she canceled the meeting and then again for the second time.

“I’ve always felt that it wasn’t ready enough, if I had a bit more time to fine-tune, work out the logic, and fix the bugs then it would be fine.”

After a couple of weeks it was time again to meet and present the prototype.

“That night I really wanted to cancel. But I knew that it was starting to get out of control and that I couldn’t keep canceling these meetings.”

Summing up all her courage she decided just to go with it.

Nervously presenting her prototype, Maitreyee was shocked that he enjoyed it when they were testing it out.

Maitreyee Joshi. Volunteer Position: Web Content Specialist.
EducateHaitiNow

“As he went through his thought process and described a verbal layout of the building, I was starting to get excited and thinking that this may actually just work.”

The meeting was just the push that Maitreyee needed to take on the development further.

In hindsight, she knew that she had exaggerated the situation and was stuck in a cycle of thinking that the prototype was never good enough, which she regrets. Asking what advice she would give to others engineers who get stuck in the same cycle of thinking, she replied “Just face your fears, push yourself to go outside, take the leap, and just do it!”


To follow Maitreyee progress you can visit her website at

http://www.maitreyeejoshi.com/

Sources: Femgineer

In college at 12, off to start her Ph.D. at 16, Tigard's Tesca Fitzgerald blazes new intellectual territory

ORIGINAL: Oregon Live
By Betsy Hammond, The Oregonian
June 12, 2013

 

At age 16, Tesca Fitzgerald will graduate with honors Sunday from Portland State University and head to a prestigious computer science Ph.D. program. Those who know her well say she is unfailingly fun to be around and always likes to try new things, whether tap dance, a new route to the bus stop or stretching software past what its designers thought were the limits. (Beth Nakamura/The Oregonian) 

During her first week in college, in a discrete mathematics class at Portland Community College, Tesca Fitzgerald sat in the back of the room trying not to call attention to herself. A diligent student, she soon raised her hand and asked a question.

Every head in the room swiveled. Why such a childlike-voice in advanced college math?

The pint-size pony-tailed 12-year-old would go on to ace the class.

Now 16, the self-possessed teen from Tigard will graduate Sunday from Portland State University with honors in computer science. Oregon's six other public universities will hold graduations Saturday and Monday.

After being heavily wooed by several of the nation's top computer science programs, Fitzgerald is headed to Georgia Tech to earn her Ph.D. with a specialty in artificial intelligence.

Over and over, she has turned heads by quietly pushing the envelope to pull off intellectual feats. Explaining one of them, with a simplicity that explains many, she says, "It was because I wanted to do something different that nobody had done before."

With her degree and know-how, Fitzgerald could easily have scored a high-paying job at her choice of Portland firms. Most of her fellow C.S. majors have done just that.

Her desire to stretch exploration of human and artificial intelligence explains her plans to instead move 2,600 miles from the parents and sisters she adores to spend six years or more earning a doctorate.

She chose Georgia Tech because it offers a computer science specialty called interactive computing that will allow her to delve into cognitive science, neuroscience and other interdisciplinary arenas.

"My passion lies in finding new solutions to new problems," she says.

Her talent for computing showed early, thanks in part to an unusual home environment. Her parents, both with MBAs, worked at home a lot, half time for her trust-manager mom, Ami, full time for her self-taught database designer dad, Mark.
He had a lot of computers, enough that all three daughters could bang around on them from infancy and got one of their own as preschoolers.

One scene from a plane, as recalled by Ami Fitzgerald: When Tesca was not yet 2, she and her mother took a flight, each with her own laptop, unusual for a toddler in the 1990s. While Ami worked, Tesca played a simple interactive game, appearing to deftly use the computer as she sucked on her pacifier. Other passengers gaped.

At landing time, mother told daughter to shut down her computer, and she did. But Ami struggled to get hers off, even after she yanked out the battery pack. A flustered flight attendant insisted she shut it down.

From the back of the plane, a chorus of voices shouted: "Ask the baby." Fitzgerald passed the laptop to Tesca, who did, indeed, turn it off.

"The whole back of the plane erupted," Ami Fitzgerald says.

The program Tesca played was a Reader Rabbit game designed to teach 4- to 6-year-olds letters, sounds and words. Her parents assumed she was just enjoying the goofy graphics and punching random keys.

When older sister Tayt was 5, her teacher declared her ready to read and sent home easy picture books. On her first try, Tayt did well.

Tesca, not yet 3, said what any little sister might: "My turn." Then, to her mother's astonishment, "She read and read and read. Every book you could put in front of her, she could read."

At age 2, with help only from Reader Rabbit, she had cracked the code.

On trips to and from Tayt's school, Ami Fitzgerald would strap 3-year-old Tesca in her car seat and hand her second-grade books. The toddler greedily consumed them.

"That's when I realized, 'Huh, we're going to have an issue,'" Ami Fitzgerald says.

At age 8, a pony-tailed Tesca Fitzgerald made a chess move in a game against her big sister, Tayt. The two super-smart sisters went through high school, Portland Community College and Portland State University together. Both graduate Sunday, Tayt with a degree in English, Tesca with hers in computer science. Bob Ellis / The Oregonian / 2005

She was a successful certified trust and financial adviser with a full-time career. She had barely heard of home schooling and had no idea how to teach.

But super-bright Tayt was being bullied at school. Ultra-bright Tesca was so far off the charts no regular classroom would fit.

So Ami Fitzgerald became a home-schooling mom, a role she still plays for 13-year-old Tylise.

Tesca Fitzgerald has a prodigious ability to memorize, lightning-fast learning skills and a passion for cutting-edge computing, says her senior thesis adviser, associate computer science professor Bart Massey. But his star student says another factor helps explain her trajectory: robotics team.

With its zany atmosphere, novel challenges and reward for smart coding, robotics taught her how much fun she could have writing software as part of a team, she says.

Almost by chance, Tesca got to take part at age 5 in an organized robotics program that has thousands of mostly middle-school-age Oregonians building and programming rudimentary robots for table-top contests each year.

Tayt was invited to help form a team. Tesca tagged along. On Day One, the woman guiding the team asked Tesca, "Do you want to learn how to program the robot?" She never looked back.

"I was the lead programmer that year," she says. "I loved the challenge, and I kept coming back to try to take it to the next level." As a member of the FIRST LEGO League's Fire-breathing Rubber Duckies, she programmed robots for seven years, culminating when she led the Duckies to the world competition as a 13-year-old PCC student.

Teams receive identical, easy-to-program kits. Tesca, naturally, found unprecedented ways to do more.

Tesca Fitzgerald, left, then a 14-year-old community college student, took part in a state robotics competition with friends Amiel Patton-Hall and Jevon Streicher. "Tesca is extremely smart and it's a ball to have conversations with her," says Patton-Hall, who took college physics at PSU with Fitzgerald this year. Randy Rasmussen/The Oregonian/2011 One year a new programmable box was introduced, with room to give the robot only five series of moves because the visual programming language took up so much space.

After reading 100 pages of technical background, Tesca found an out: She would write lots of programs to direct the robot's movements in plain text programs that take up little room. She would write only one program in the bulky built-in visual language -- one that could translate her text commands into the visual programming that was the only language the robot could understand.

Her team advanced to the international meet but was nearly disqualified there, Ami Fitzgerald says. "They didn't think a 10-year-old could do that work. It was such a unique concept, even the (organizers) had never thought of it and were sure a grown-up must have come up with it."

But the teen confidently made her case to 15 dubious adults. It helped that she is an unusually poised public speaker who has, among other things, helped keynote a major Google science fair event in New York City. Even so, she was asked to submit to a software exam and show her transcript before they relented.

Two years later, she reached her mini-robot zenith: She spent 600-plus hours to write and perfect a complex artificial intelligence code so the robot could make its own decisions and operate itself. Designers of the robotics program flew in from Europe and talked to her for hours about how she pushed their software beyond what any had imagined possible.

"These adults learned from someone who had tested their software to the absolute limit," Ami Fitzgerald says.

Massey, the honors thesis adviser, says Tesca Fitzgerald is still enlightening her elders. The speed, versatility and creativity she's exhibited in creating a program to test-drive user interfaces, researching machine learning logarithms and other projects have wowed people more than twice her age, he says.

"That's how it should be with your best undergraduates. By the end, they're teaching you stuff."

--Betsy Hammond