Great Idea: The Water Canary

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Over the years science has made great advances at predicting the occurrences of hurricanes and tsunamis, which has saved thousands of lives around the world. However, one type of disaster that science has failed to accurately predict and control is disasters related to water supply.  Diseases like cholera and dysentery can devastate populations of people worldwide simply by spreading through the local water supply, and once the disease has begun to spread in this way it is very difficult, time consuming, and inefficient to control the outbreak.

Currently, the only method of testing water for safety and freedom of disease is a very time consuming process that involves the use of expensive equipment as well as trained technicians; both of which are in short supply in the poverty stricken lands where waterborne illness can be most devastating. Sonaar Luthra saw this problem and was the first to start doing something about it.

Working with fellow engineers and UNICEF, Sonaar Luthra is developing a cheap, simplified, rapid response water testing device which he calls the Water Canary (based off the mining canaries that warned miners of dangerous gasses in the mines). This device wouldn’t run on the typical chemical reactions that most water testing processes utilize; instead it would be solar powered. This energy source allows it to be much quicker at determining water safety, and the overall operating system is extremely simple and requires no special training. These simple, efficient devices could potentially be linked through a network which would serve as a first alert warning system that could track the movement and patterns of contaminated water supplies before they got out of control. This device is specifically tailored to be most effective at solving a problem in the areas that previously would be the most vulnerable to it, which makes it a great idea. 

Great Idea: Squishy Circuit

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              One of the fondest memories of my childhood was playing around with that squishy, brightly-colored clay that most people know of as Playdough; however, I was missing out, because I was using the store bought kind.  It wasn’t until a few years ago that I discovered that you can actually make play dough at home with common household ingredients like flour and salt; you can even color them with food coloring. Needless to say I was disappointed that I hadn’t discovered this sooner. But, what I’ve just discovered is that I’m not the only one who discovered something new about play dough far beyond their childhood years.

            
               AnnMarie Thomas is an engineer, a teacher at the University of St. Thomas, and a huge believer in the value of hands-on learning. One day, she tried to teach her own daughter about circuitry and electricity, and discovered how difficult and frustrating it was for her daughter to maneuver and connect little wires and circuit boards with her tiny hands. Her daughter wasn’t learning anything and if anything it was making her daughter hate learning about electricity.  So AnnMarie and one of her students, Sam, came up with a solution: squishy circuits.

            
              A lot of us probably don’t know this (I know I didn’t), but play dough is actually conductive to electricity! Especially, it turns out, the homemade kind you make with salt and flour from your kitchen. This homemade play dough is even more conductive to electricity than the store bought kind, and can be used to demonstrate all sorts of properties about electricity. In addition, a second recipe of homemade play dough that uses sugar instead of salt, is much less conductive to electricity, and helps make the play dough circuits even more realistic and complex.

            
            Using these two types of homemade play dough, AnnMarie and her daughter lit up lights, powered propellers, and learned a lot about the properties of electricity. AnnMarie even took the idea back to her engineering lab at her university and had her students experiment with it there. This is a cute, simple, fun, and clever idea, and I bet it could help a lot of young kids get excited about science if more kids knew about it.