The olfactory alarm clock can wake you with the scent of mint or money. Update: Hickey, Judge, and Healy–Thow won their age category and took home the grand prize. Hickey says the bacteria may also reduce the need for chemical fertilizers, which can harm the environment. Over the course of three years, the team has tested some 13,000 seeds and has a large controlled field site set up with another 3,600 seeds in their hometown. They found that the microbes increased seed germination rates by 50 percent. Though many people told them that the bacteria would have no impact on cereal crops, the friends decided to test it on barley. “We became really interested in what this bacteria can do and what people haven’t done with it so far,” said Healy-Thow. At the time, their class was studying the world food crisis in geography, and an idea for a science project quickly germinated. Emer Hickey, Ciara Judge, and Sophie Healy–Thow, all 16, learned that the wart-like nodules hold beneficial bacteria known as rhizobia that produce ammonia and other compounds that help the plants grow. World Hunger: A chance observation about warts on a pea plant led three friends from Kinsale, Ireland on a three-year mission to solve the world food crisis. Update: Garimella won his age category and the computer science prize.īacteria Vs. The machines, he says, can be deployed to survey disaster zones and would be able to nimbly navigate around obstacles and evade falling debris. Using infrared distance sensors, Arduino programming and a quadrotor – a flying robot with four propellers – Garimella designed a mini flying machine that can take off rapidly in response to objects approaching from different directions. “So our house was filled with fruit flies that I was trying to swat.” To his frustration, he realized how quickly the fruit fly’s visual system operates despite the tiny size of its brain (only 100,000 neurons versus a human’s 100 billion). “Last summer, my family went to India, and when we came back we realized there were these bananas on the counter that we forgot to throw out,” he says. The Fruit-Fly-Inspired Flying Robot can dodge incoming objects fast.įruit Fly-Inspired Flying Robots: Rotting fruit inspired 14-year old Mihir Garimella of Pittsburgh to design a new navigation system for robots.
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