Every year the accomplishments of high school students provide amazing hope for the future. I am glad for the organizations that highlight the efforts of these students and provide awards for a few of the most amazing accomplishments. The top 40 students all get at least $25,000 (with the top 10 getting more).

Ana Humphrey, 18, of Alexandria, Virginia, won the top award of $250,000 for her mathematical model to determine the possible locations of exoplanets — planets outside our solar system — that may have been missed by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. The second place award and $175,000 went to Samuel Weissman 17, of Rosemont, Pennsylvania for his project analyzing the genetic makeup of HIV in two patients on long-term anti-retroviral therapy to understand why they continued to have “reservoirs” of treatment-resistant HIV-infected cells. The third place and $150,000 went to Adam Ardeishar, 17, of Alexandria, Virginia, for his project combining a classic previously unsolved math problem called the “coupon collector problem” with extreme value theory.

To learn more and see about applying next year see the Society for Science site.

Related: Intel International Science and Engineering Fair 2015 – MIT Engineering Design Workshop for Boston High School Students – Intel Science and Engineering Fair 2009 Webcasts

15 Year-Old Kenyan Prodigy, Richard Turere, Who Created “Lion Lights”

This is a great video which includes good examples of the value to experimenting, learning and adapting. Iteration is a critical skill when developing solutions. Try out prototypes and learn from what happens. Use that knowledge to develop new solutions or modify the existing solutions and experiment some more. Continue to iterate and improve.

This is another great example of people using their initiative, creativity and engineering talent to create appropriate technology solutions to create solutions that improve their lives. It is great to see how these efforts continue over time, this BBC article follows up on Richard Turere several years after his initial success:

What happened to the boy who chased away the lions?

The efforts of so many great young people to create solutions that make the world a better place are inspiring.

Related: Electric Wind – Beehive Fence Protects Farms from Elephants – Appropriate Technology and Focus on Improving Lives at MIT – Using The Building of Robots to Engage Students in Learning

Fundi bots has a mission to use robotics training in African schools to create and inspire a new generation of problem solvers, innovators and change-makers. I believe strongly in this type of effort. We waste so much human potential by killing students design to learn. Instead we need to create systems that not only don’t kill that desire but allow it to flourish.

Fundi Bots focuses on the technological process of building robots as a way for students to look at the world around them from a practical, solution oriented perspective. By guiding students through problem identification, brainstorming, collaboration, construction, programming, final deployment and system feedback, we show them how the problems around them can be solved through a technological approach and persistent reductive analysis.

Fundi Made is an effort to create professional grade electronics right in our Fundi Spaces, and deploy the products in five core market segments; home-automation, agriculture, energy, security and health.

Related: Promoting Innovation in Sierra Leone – Letting Children Learn using Hole in the Wall Computers – Given Tablets but No Teachers, Kids Teach Themselves (Having Never Seen Advanced Technology Before) – Teaching Through Tinkering – Encouraging Curiosity in Kids – 20th Annual US First Robotics Competition (2012)

If you exclude health, women still lead 465,000 to 451,000.

The same data for master’s degrees:

Excluding health the totals are: women 100,000, men 125,000.

In 2005, 235,197 women received undergraduate science and engineering degrees, compared to 230,806 for men. In 2005, 53,051 women received masters science and engineering degrees, compared to 66,974 men. All increased a large amount from 2005 to 2010 and degrees awarded to women increased much faster than the increase seen for men.

As I predicted in 2008 (Women Choosing Other Fields Over Engineering and Math) the trends continued and resulted in large imbalances in favor of women at the undergraduate level for science related degrees.

At the masters level women continue to increase degrees (nearly doubling from 2005 to 2010 excluding health). The relative gains (compared to men) at the masters level are small in that 5 year period, but it seems to me the news is mainly good. I expect women will show relative gains at the masters and PhD levels going forward, though those gains may well be slower than they were at the undergraduate level.

STEM fields continue to show large gender imbalances (with women and men dominating certain fields and being relatively rare in others). Continuing to provide opportunities for talented and interested students to explore their field of choice is important for the students well being and for the well being of society. We want to take advantage of the great minds we have and not have people excluded from pursuing their dreams.

Related: Alternative Career Paths Attract Many Women in Science Fields – The USA is Losing Scientists and Engineers Educated in the USA

You can also get a boxed set of The Feynman Lectures on Physics for those that like paper. It is fantastic but not cheap.

Bill Gates bought the rights to the rights to The Character of Physical Law, 7 lectures Feynman gave at Cornell University (these are separate from the lectures listed above) and made them available online, which is great. Unfortunately the website is based on Microsoft tools and therefore quite a bother for many (or maybe even impossible with Linux computers – I am not sure). I guess since he made all his money via Microsoft it isn’t that surprising but it would have been nice if he provide the content in a more easily accessible way (even if they didn’t do the fancy additions they did on the Microsoft site. These are great enough videos to probably be worth the bother of installing proprietary Microsoft software in order to view them.

Related: Video of Young Richard Feynman Talking About Scientific Thinking – Feynman “is a second Dirac, only this time human” (Oppenheimer) – Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of a Curious Character

Keven Stonewall Preventing Colon Cancer from VNM USA on Vimeo.

Keven Stonewall is a student at the University of Wisconsin – Madison working to prevent colon cancer.

Related: I Always Wanted to be Some Sort of Scientist – High School Student Creates Test That is Much More Accurate and 26,000 Times Cheaper Than Existing Pancreatic Cancer Tests – Webcast of a T-cell Killing a Cancerous Cell

It is very easy to forget billions of people alive today do not have access to electricity, clean water and things like washing machines at home. As I have said before I love appropriate technology. Even more than that I love to see successful deployments of appropriate technology that make people’s lives better.

It is also great to see kids with the perseverance to make these products to meet needs they see around them. We need to do what we can to encourage these types of kids. They are the future engineers and entrepreneurs that will make lives better for the rest of society.

Remya Jose, a 14 year school girl from Kerala, India created this wonderful machine. Another version of it, has the normal bike pedals (closer together, instead of spread out, on opposite sides of the machine, like in the video).

As far as I can tell the original video was from 2008 (and Remya created the machine in 2005). I haven’t been able to find the current status of the product, this is the best I could find (from 2008). Turning these innovations into products that succeed commercially is very hard.

If I had control of a national development program (or if I just become super rich and have millions to devote to making the world better, I think an effort like this would be something I would try) I would put working with these kids to make the products work very high on my list of priorities. The learning process and creation of engineers and entrepreneurs would be extremely valuable on top of any success the products had.

Related: Appropriate Technology: Washing Clothes by Machine Instead by Hand – Washing Machine Uses 90% Less Water – Engineering a Better World: Bike Corn-Sheller – another bicycle washing machine – Automatic Dog Washing Machine

Survivebio [site is offline, here a site you might be interested in – iBiology] is a resources that matches my desires exactly. You can go and learn about whatever topics you desire, when you desire. The site offers webcasts, games, flashcards, chapter outlines, practice tests and a forum to discuss the ideas.

In this webcast, Paul Andersen discusses the specifics of phylogenetics. The evolutionary relationships of organisms are discovered through both morphological and molecular data.

The aim of the SurviveBio web site is to aid AP (and college) biology students. But it is also a great resource to learn about biology if you are interested in that topic. Hopefully they will add more webcasts. The site uses webcasts from Bozeman Science which has a huge number of very good videos on biology and also, chemistry, physics, earth science, statistics, anatomy and physiology.

Related: Great Webcast Explaining the Digestive Systems – Cell Aging and Limits Due to Telomeres – Human Gene Origins: 37% Bacterial, 35% Animal, 28% Eukaryotic

I am surprised the fewer than 50% of the people got 2 true or false questions correct, including “Electrons are smaller than atoms. Is this statement…” Looking back at my previous post, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, in the 2009 Pew Science Knowledge Quiz it is also the case that under 50% got the are electrons smaller than atoms question right.

They also provided a breakdown by demographic factors. Men had better percentages of correct answers, for the 2 true or false questions men were correct 55% of the time while women got 40% correct. The two other true of false questions had much higher correct answer rates 77% (83% for men 72% for women) and 66% (70 for men, 63 for women).

There was also a substantial tendency for the youngest ages to do better and the performance to decline for each age group. I am not surprised by the question answered incorrectly most often (only 20% got it right), see if you can guess which it is.

Which natural resource is extracted in a process known as “fracking”? is the only question the over 64 age group was correct more often than the 18 to 29 year olds (50% to 35%). The over 64 group never beat the 30 to 49 or 50 to 64 groups. In general it does seem the younger groups did better but there are several cases where that didn’t play out exactly.

As you would expect those with more education got the question right more often (the 3 options were high school graduate or less, some college, college graduate). On no questions did a lower education level beat a higher education level.

48% of the quiz takers got 9 or more correct. Stumbling on a couple doesn’t surprise me. I do wish that the results were better though. The results are one more indication that scientific literacy is not what I would like to see in the USA.

Related: Christian Science Monitor Scientific Literacy Quiz – Nearly Half of Adults in the USA Don’t Know How Long it Takes the Earth to Circle the Sun – 2009 International Student Results for Science and Math Have Finland, Korea and Japan at the top – Understanding the Evolution of Human Beings by Country – Poor Results on Evolution and Big Bang Questions Omitted From NSF Report