Jack Andraka at a teen summit in NYC (Credit: Benjamin Quinto)

By Donisha Dansby

Jack Andraka is not your ordinary teenager. Instead of hanging out with friends or watching TV, Andraka prefers working in a lab, looking for a new way to detect cancer.

The crazy thing is, he actually did! At just 16 Andraka has created a new tool to detect pancreatic cancer in its early stages that he says is cheaper, less intrusive and better at detecting cancer than our current method. Anadraka’s test can fit in your backpack. He told us that his breakthrough hinges on a material called carbon nanotubes.

They’re these long thin pipes of carbon, they’re an atom thick and .150 the diameter of your hair. However despite this they have these incredible properties, they are kind of like the superhero material of science. For example: they are stronger than steel, they can also transfer electricity better than copper. They have all these applications. Then we have these things called antibodies; antibody is a type of molecule that only reacts to one specific protein. In this case the protein would be a cancer biomarker called mesothelin that circulates your bloodstream at very high levels when you have these different types of cancers, like pancreatic, ovarian and lung cancer. So you have this circulating mesothelin in your bloodstream and I want to detect that.

Essentially what I do is weave these antibodies into a network of carbon nanotubes so that you have a network that reacts with one specific protein. Due to the properties of carbon nanotubes, when the reaction happens, the network would change its electrical properties based on the amount of protein present. I would measure that change with a $50 meter I got from Home Depot and essentially I would be able to detect cancer…and potentially any disease ranging from HIV/AIDS to Alzheimer’s.

Andraka says his test improves on the original pancreatic cancer test in a number of ways.

Unlike our current pancreatic cancer test which costs $800 per test and misses 30% of all cancers, my test cost three cents, takes five minutes to run, doesn’t require specialized training and it’s a lot smaller than the current test. Here are some statistics: it is 168 times faster, over 2600 times less expensive, and over 400 times more extensive than our current standard of detection.

Andraka’s innovation has turned him into something of a celebrity. He’s won a major scientific award, given a TED Talk, and met some pretty interesting people. Andraka says one of his highlights: ”It was really cool going to the State of the Union and being able to talk to Obama. I only got to talk to him for like five minutes, but it was insanely cool to talk to the world leader of democracy about your science fair project.” During their conversation, President Obama didn’t treat Andraka like a teenager but asked him about his experience trying to get his test approved by the government regulatory agencies.

Andraka expects that his test will be used in medical centers within the next two to five years, after it receives approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

More from Youth Radio’s science desk, including past Brains and Beakers: Gamifying Air Pollution and the Science of Taste.

By Donta Jackson

I met my first drone playing Call Of Duty: Black Ops. In the game, you can control one of these unmanned flying vehicles to hover and fire missiles to destroy enemy territory. In real life we also associate drones with death from above. The news constantly reminds us of their destructive power, but at a recent Brains and Beakers, Youth Radio’s science-speaker series, Chris Anderson demonstrated how drones can be constructive too.

Anderson was a journalist for nearly two decades, as an editor for The Economist, then as editor-in-chief for WIRED magazine, where he was until last year. He left journalism to start 3D Robotics, a robotic manufacturing company, where he is building the next generation of user-friendly drones.

At the Brains and Beakers event, Anderson showed us video footage of a drone in action in downtown Oakland. It carried a high-resolution video camera that captured a bird’s-eye view of the city. In the near future, drones could be programmed by skateboarders to follow them on rides, or by pharmacists to deliver over-the-counter drugs to your doorstep. People will think up lots of ways to use drones when they become available to everyone. My first thought for how I’d use my own drone: pranks. Imagine attaching a water balloon to your own drone and flying it high over your friend’s head and letting it drop! No drone water balloons yet, though. Under current laws, the Federal Flight Administration controls the air space and prohibits most drone-use in urban areas, and any changes are probably a couple years away.

Which is OK, because based on my first test drive of a drone-like quadcopter, I might need a few years to practice.

More from Youth Radio’s science desk, including past Brains and Beakers: Gamifying Air Pollution and the Science of Taste.

Could video games save the environment? Maybe with the kind Greg Niemeyer is trying to build. Niemeyer specializes in digital art, and his most recent work focuses on games that seek and support cultural change. He’s an assistant professor for new media at UC Berkeley, and presented at the last Brains and Beakers event, Youth Radio’s quarterly science dialogue series.

Niemeyer demonstrated his new open-source game, “AirQuest,” at this event. It blends BMX bike racing with real world challenges like managing asthma and responding to air pollution. The air pollution data in the game is based off of actual air quality measurements around Fresno, CA. Niemeyer set the game in the Central Valley partly because of its high pollution levels and partly because of how much we rely on that area to grow our food.

You start the game as a character riding a bike down the highway, dodging potholes and trucks. You are trying to make it to the airport before you miss your flight. If your character doesn’t make it to the airport on time,  you have to go back to town to make money. Your character works at a recycling factory, sorting garbage until you’ve earned enough money to buy the medicine you need. Next you have to navigate a hospital maze to find inhalers so that you can try to bike to the airport again. The plot of the game was designed with the help of students in Fresno who wanted the goal of the game to be leaving Fresno.

Niemeyer and his team of undergraduate game-makers explained the technical side of the project. Air Quest was created on a program called Unity, which allows people to create games for various platforms, like iOS and Android, while eliminating the long process of optimizing for each platform. The Air Quest demo is currently a web app but will be launched on other platforms later.

Finally, we got a chance to try out a demo of Air Quest on a tablet. The game was interesting because it related to real life but it was pretty simple. In a final version I’d like more challenges added, like seeing how much electricity you can save by unplugging appliances and turning off lights. They could add another level where you earn money by harvesting organic fruits and vegetables. One question I have about the game is that winning means getting out of Fresno. Why not win by staying to figure out ways to help Fresno become less polluted?

We recommend you check it out for yourself once it is completed. For more information on our guest at Youth Radio, visit Greg Niemeyer’s site.

More from Youth Radio’s science desk here, including past Brains and Beakers: Reinventing musical instruments, Green Chemistry, and the Science of Taste.

By Ashley Williams

Are you trying to get new speakers in your car but they’re too expensive? Have you ever considered making your own? It’s easy, and the price is right.

For Youth Radio’s latest installment in our science series, Brains and Beakers(or should I say Brains and Speakers?), the Explainers from the Exploratorium came to teach us how to make our own speakers. Being teens themselves, the Explainers can relate to wanting to have music on all the time. So it was exciting when they told us that we can blast our favorite songs whenever we wanted, with just a few items from the local hardware store. All you need are magnets, alligator clips, copper wire, a cone (that could be made out of anything), and of course, a music player.

The Explainers were fielding questions from left and right. “What happens if we play it through the table?” someone shouted out. So the Explainers cleared all their materials and used the table as if it were a speaker box. Everyone crowded around, and pushed their ears right onto the table and to our surprise, the music came through.

Youth Radio reporter, Chantell Williams, stepped up with the next question: “Can you turn your body into a speaker?”The Explainers took the challenge and invited a couple of usto test outa makeshift body-speaker. Eddie Zazueta put himself on the line, and if you listen closely, you can hear the music through his jaw.

The speaker we made may not play as loudlyor as cleanly as the ones in your trunk, but hey, what do you expect from a sound system that you can make in 10 minutes for less than $10?

More from Youth Radio’s science desk here, including past Brains and Beakers: Reinventing musical instruments, Green Chemistry, and the Science of Taste.

Chris Randolph and Bailey Da Costa are juniors at Aptos high school in Aptos, California. They are part of the school’s robotics club. Last year they built a small, remote-controlled submarine that actually explored a shipwreck. Now, team-member Michael Sheely is looking forward to stepping up their game, with some help from the pros.  Sheely says, “this year the theme for our robotics competition is going to be observation, so we’re just getting a feel for how the professionals do that sort of thing.”

What better way to learn than to experience underwater observation first-hand? Guillermo Söhnlein, founder and Chief Operating Officer of Ocean Gate*, the ocean exploration group behind today’s dive, introduces the young ocean-explorers to the submarine, Antipodes.  The name comes from a Greek term Plato used to describe the Earth’s two surfaces: one above and one below. This sub goes between the two.

Before heading out, Söhnlein first briefs the students on Antipodes’ many features and fail-safes.  This sub can carry five people  to a depth of about a thousand feet. It weighs nearly 15,000 lbs, but to maintain neutral buoyancy, pilots can tell when it’s just 10 lbs too heavy or light. Like a giant pair of lungs, it pumps pure oxygen in and carbon dioxide out.  In a worst-case-scenario, Antipodes is equipped with an extra 72 hours of air and emergency life support.

Today’s mission fortunately only lasts two hours.  Another research vessel tows the sub to the right depth and releases it into a world few humans will ever get to see. The submarine’s pilot, 22-year-old Erika Bergman, says the view is incredible. But beyond the beauty, she says manned-submarines provide one thing that other forms of ocean exploration can’t: us. Bergman argues, “there’s no replacement for a human being and a human brain being down there and interacting with the environment.”

The students stayed above the water, observing from the ship’s deck, but Da Costa from the Aptos high school robotics team, couldn’t agree more; “I see things and want to know how things work and seeing stuff like this, it brings it all together.”

For an alternate take on our ocean adventure, check out this podcast from Youth Radio’s Teresa Chin. Check out more from Youth Radio’s podcast here and Youth Radio’s science desk here, including Reinventing musical instruments, Green Chemistry, and the Science of Taste.

*Update 12/10/12 Guillermo Söhnlein is with Ocean Gate Inc. The OceanGate Foundation is the non profit organization that plans and funds educational outreach through ocean exploration.

We began by taking sips from the color-coded cups and discovered the five tastes: sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami. I had never heard of umami, but it tasted like miso soup. As unfavorable as some of these tasted, they were all familiar in some way.

Next, Barb demonstrated the difference between taste and smell. We used a straw to smell a mystery food in a cup. When I sucked in the air, I found out I could taste very aged cheese. That’s when I learned that we can smell through our mouths, which is why taste and smell are often interchanged when we talk about them.

Then Barb had us plug our noses prior to eating a jelly bean. I was a little surprised that when I put one in my mouth, I only tasted sweetness. But then when I unplugged my nose, it felt like my mouth was overwhelmed with flavor. Barb clarified that because we can only sense five different tastes, everything else we “tasted” was actually a flavor based on what we could smell. I thought about how when I watched Fear Factor, I always saw people cover their noses when they had to eat cow brains or maggots, but I had never understood the correlation between closing your nose and what goes in your mouth.

Being a film and food junkie, I like to eat as if I were in the movie Ratatouille — trying to taste and smell the goodness of every bite. With the lessons I learned from Barb, I can enjoy the tastes, smells, and textures that make up the food experience that much more.

This Brains and Beakers was hosted by Youth Radio’s Yohan Callen. Text by Tajah Jones/ Video by Jenny Bolario

More Info:

Brains and Beakers takes science out of the lab and turns it into a live event! Youth Radio’s young journalists host scientists, tinkerers and makers of all sorts at our Oakland studio for live demos and interviews. Check out more from Youth Radio’s science desk here, including Reinventing musical instruments and Green Chemistry.

Youth Radio invited sound artist Sudhu Tewari to our studios for an exciting Brains and Beakers event on the science behind “seeing” sound. He brought in an instrument he created using a colander, springs, and some spare television and speaker parts. Initially, I thought that something that could double as a spaghetti strainer would not be ideal as an instrument. But to my surprise, it worked really well. Sudhu showed us how sound and light could correspond with each other, connecting music and movement. As the bass hit, tiny lights on the TV screens moved up and down. It was truly a work of art.

After the demo, our Youth Radio Science Desk asked Sudhu Tewari to reflect on the ways artists are starting to use sight and touch in popular music.

Musician and tinkerer Sudhu Tewari uses old television and kitchen parts to visualize sounds. Image courtesy of Sudhu Tewari.

YR: In one sentence, can you explain what you do for a living?

ST: I build interactive artworks that combine science, visuals and sound.

YR: Do you need a PhD for that?

ST: (Laughs) No, but I’m getting one anyone. I’m studying cultural musicology at UC Santa Cruz, and I already did an MFA [Masters in Fine Arts] in electronic music and recording media from Mills College in Oakland.

YR: A masters in electronic music. Is that like a masters in DJing?

ST: Totally different. In the mid-50s people in France began playing with recording sound on record players, and they called it musique concrète. As in “concrete,” because you could take sound as a physical object and manipulate it, turn in backwards, speed it up, turn it over, etc. That’s was the birth of one side of electronic music. On the other, people in Germany were creating music that was purely electronically generated.

YR: Kind of like your demo at Youth Radio’s Brains and Beakers. As part of your demo, you had the young people make sounds that showed up on the TVs. Can you explain what was going on?

ST: That’s an old technique that I believe comes from something television repairmen did as a test. In TVs, there’s a part called a cathode tube that shoots out a magnetically charged beam of light. There are two coils of wire that are wrapped around the back of the tube. The electronics of the TV use that beam of light to pull the coils up and down, etc. Usually, the beam of light moves really fast and it draws the picture you see on the screen. What I’ve done is take out the TV electronics so that the beam of light shoots out directly into the screen. And I use sound to move the coils with speakers. So it’s a beam of light that’s moved the same way that a speaker cone is moved back and forth.

YR: Where did you get the idea for that project?

ST: I wanted to make people more aware of the sounds they hear, and I thought that one way to enhance listening is through looking. For me, “music” is a cultural construction that says we sit down and listen to sound in a specific way. But “sound” is around us all the time, and can be listened to the same as music. The underlying idea with all of these things is to listen to everyday sound the same way we listen to music.
YR: What kind of music were you into as a kid?

I had a unique musical upbringing. My mother is a classical pianist and my father is a trained Indian vocalist, so I grew up with both classic western and Indian music. Every night I would fall asleep in my dad’s lap while he was singing. He had a PhD in ethnomusicology, so he would also listen to recordings from other countries: Japanese and Balinese music, you name it. So I grew up surrounded by all these different musical instruments, learning Bach on the flute and the piano, singing in children’s choirs. I also liked taking apart electronics, so that came into play later with my music.
YR: Can you think of examples of “seeing sound” or sound art in popular music?

ST: OK Go is a good example of a band that is moving things farther in the way they use choreography to enhance or create their music. They’ve definitely taken music videos to a new realm.

I’m also really into Trimpin. He’s a German born artist based in Seattle. He builds machines that make music, for example a flame organ that creates pitches. Also anything by John Cage.

YR: Do you have any suggestions for other makers or musicians who want to play with the way we experience music?

ST: Yeah, just walk around and listen to stuff. I bang on objects all the time, and stick my head down and listen. I found out that the steel railing out in front of the court house has an awesome sound, especially if you wear a metal earring. You need to experiment with things. I also like taking stuff apart to see how it works. So if you’re into record players and tape decks, open it up and play with it.

More Info:

Brains and Beakers takes science out of the lab and turns it into a live event! Youth Radio’s young journalists host scientists, tinkerers and makers of all sorts at our Oakland studio for live demos and interviews. Check out more from Youth Radio’s science desk here, including Reinventing musical instruments and Green Chemistry.

This Brains and Beakers was hosted by Youth Radio’s Jabari Jones. The post was created by the Youth Radio Science Team: Video editing by Chaz Hubbard and Jenny Bolario. Blog post by Jabari Jones. Q&A by Teresa Chin. Special thanks to our guest speaker Sudhu Tewari. Sudhu is an electro-acoustic composer, musician, and tinkerer. He is a former artist-in-residence at the San Francisco Dump, where he crafted interactive sculptures and kinetic art. In 2012 he was one of the featured artists at the San Francisco Exploratorium’s Tinkering Studio. For more information about his current exhibits, visit www.sudhutewari.com.

Youth Radio’s Brains and Beakers series welcomed Leah Rubin from UC Berkeley’s new green chemistry center to discuss ways to make the dyes in our food and hygiene products healthier for our bodies, and more sustainable for the environment. Check out the video to learn more about green chemistry and find out how to make your own natural dyes at home.

This Brains and Beakers was hosted by Youth Radio’s Jon Anabo. Video produced by Teresa Chin with Luis Flores and Myles Bess. 

Yassine Bouanane has been a coding whiz since before he was a teenager — at 12, he started developing his own web sites. But then last summer, the 17-year-old from Quebec decided he would engineer a way to squeeze more energy out of solar panels, and he didn’t know the first thing about electronics.

“It was completely new to me,” said Bouanane. “I had to learn everything from the beginning.”

He began by reading articles on the Internet and watching videos on YouTube. He started spending a lot of time in his garage, tinkering with one prototype after another. Months of hard work got him a fourth prototype — a solar panel that senses the sun’s location in the sky and follows it throughout the day to produce over 35 percent more energy than standard solar panels.

It also got him a trip to Palo Alto as a finalist in the 2012 Google Science Fair, which had its award ceremony earlier this week.

Now in its second year, Google’s contest highlights the breakthroughs of 13- to 18-year-olds who submit online entries from around the world and celebrates several of them with top prizes. Or, as the first year’s grand prize winner Shree Bose told the ceremony audience, “It turns its winners into scientific rockstars.”

Google Science Fair winner Jonah Kohn. (Photo: Malachi Segers)

A third of last night’s would-be rockstars, like Bouanane, were also makers. Of the 15 final projects, five of them involved inventing a mechanical system and building prototypes from scratch. And while the overall winner Brittnay Wenger’s project exists only in the cloud (she developed an artificial neural network for diagnosing breast cancer), the project that won the 13-14 division turned invisible sound waves into a more physical experience. Jonah Kohn, 14, from San Diego, invented a way for people with hearing disabilities to, well, hear — his device translates sound into frequencies you can listen to as vibrations on other parts of your body.

During the ceremony, Richard DeVaul of the Google X Lab emphasized the fun of doing something you don’t already know how to do. He told the finalists about years ago making a bulky wearable computer that was a cool, but not-so-functional precursor to the sleek Google Glass prototype that the company’s secret lab demoed this year.

“It’s the process of constructive play,” said DeVaul. “That’s how you learn to do science, that’s the essence of science.”

Rather than mere refinements or improvements to existing technology, the inventions of the Google finalists represented entirely new ways to fix major problems. While industrial solar panels already follow the sun across the sky, they’re pre-programmed to do it; Bounane’s panels actually track the sun. The technology could have a big impact for solar energy on vehicles and in poorer countries where people’s homes are temporary and they must take their energy source with them.

Solving problems in developing countries was the whole point of 16-year-old finalist Sabera Talkuder’s water purifier. Coming from Los Gatos, Calif., Talukder got her idea on a family trip to Bangladesh. She discovered that it was very difficult for people in small villages there to access clean drinking water, so she decided to invent a solution. Although, like Bounane, she first had a lot to learn.

“It was all new to me,” said Talukder. “I developed the entire apparatus from research I did off of the Internet, and talking to different people in the field.” But starting from scratch was part of the idea, since she knew the people whose tainted water she had sampled wouldn’t have many materials to work with. “These villages need to clean the water cheaply and portably,” said Talukder.

The materials needed to make her water purifier are few and simple: cotton, sand, a jute bag, a 5-gallon barrel, and a power system — solar panels, a car battery and an inverter that is hooked up to a UV light. Talukder said the prototype is still developing but that “it can’t be perfect because the people in these countries don’t need perfection, they need a solution to clean drinking water now.”

There were also more high-tech makers among finalists, including Melvin Zammit, a 17-year-old from Malta determined to revolutionize 3D technology. The problem with the standard stereoscopic tech is that a large portion of the population has cataracts and other eye problems and can’t see the optical illusion. Zammit built several devices that move LEDs very rapidly to create a layered or “real” 3D effect. “It’s like a hologram,” said Zammit.

Zammit, who has also built a tic-tac-toe-playing robot and is developing Android apps, is looking for his next project. “I really want to learn about electronic brains and stuff like that,” he said. When asked if he considered himself part of a growing maker movement, he answered: “Yes, definitely.”

More Info:

Youth Radio Investigates is an NSF-supported science reporting series in which young journalists collect and analyze original data with professional scientists, and then tell unexpected stories about what they discover. For more Youth Radio Investigates stories on Turnstyle News, a project of Youth Radio, check out:

In a High School Lab, Glimpses of an Ancient Climate

You Can Lead a Kid to Water

My Brain on Ads

When James Cameron plunged to the bottom of the Marina Trench in his sleek, $8 million submarine, it heralded a new age of underwater exploration. But the deep sea isn’t the only aquatic frontier left to explore. Around the world, there are countless undersea caves, flooded mine shafts and other underwater tight spots that have remained off limits to divers because they’re too narrow or dangerous to navigate. And happily, the right craft for the job probably isn’t a multi-million-dollar submersible, but something so accessible you can make it yourself.

“Our goal is to get as many OpenROVs out into the world as we can,” said David Lang, the co-founder of a new underwater robot (or “ROV,” remotely operated vehicle). He’s also the facilitator of a 700-member online community of professional ocean engineers and hobbyists who are collaborating to make the robot better (the “Open” part of the project’s name). To meet their goal of robotic ubiquity, Lang and his partner, Eric Stackpole, share the prototype plans on their website and will soon sell out-of-the-box OpenROV kits. (Make a big donation to the project on their Kickstarter page and they’ll send you one of the first kits available.)

Clearly, Lang and Stackpole are driven by the unique opportunity to develop a new technology that could change the future of underwater exploration. But theirs is also an older, more familiar quest: a hunt for gold.

Specifically, they’re after a legendary bounty of golden nuggets in the hills of Northern California. This spring, Lang and a bunch of friends hiked to a flooded gold mine where the treasure is said to remain sunken and hidden. They found no treasure, but instead several ways to improve the ROV. When he got back Lang told me about the expedition and shared these photos.

“About nine months ago, I was working in an office. The company I was working for ran out of money so I lost my job. But then I had this epiphany: I really wanted to start making things with my hands. I’ve spent the last nine months re-skilling myself — taking welding classes, learning how to use laser cutters and 3D printers — and writing about it for MAKE Magazine. Part of that process has been teaming up with Eric and working on this OpenROV project.

“Growing up in Humboldt County, Eric heard about the story of an underwater cave in Northern California and rumors of gold at the bottom of it. When we first met, Eric told me the story and I was captivated. We found as much information as he could online and then went up there and explored before we had the robot. We walked through the hills and found the cave and the underwater portion, just like we heard in the stories. It was pretty exciting, because that story of gold was one of the reasons we started the project.

“The ROV shines a light and then live video comes back. It’s tricky to see. Something we’re still developing is a compass heading and depth sensor. That’s really important because it’s hard to orient yourself underwater with the live video, until you have those sensors. That’s something for the open community to develop.

“We started doing this for fun, but we quickly found a lot of other people had different uses for this type of thing. We hear a lot from people who have places they really want to explore; we hear from scientists who have studies they want to conduct. One of the important aspects of the OpenROV design is that we’ve left this payload module — a space on the ROV that is specifically designed for people to add and modify. They can add a robotic arm or a pH sensor or a GoPro camera. Whatever tool they need they can modify the ROV to do that.

“I never expected to really find gold. For me, the joy was always in the process of learning how to build the robot. And to have a dream to build this open-source underwater community of people who have other ideas. This was the first story, but it’s really not the only story. Someone was just telling us about an underwater cavern in Death Valley where there’s this really rare species of fish. No divers have been in this area of the cavern, so we’re thinking about bringing the ROV there. There are all of these new and exciting places to explore — that’s what keeps us going.”

All photos courtesy of Open ROV. 

More Info:

Youth Radio Investigates is an NSF-supported science reporting series in which young journalists collect and analyze original data with professional scientists, and then tell unexpected stories about what they discover. For more Youth Radio Investigates stories on Turnstyle News, a project of Youth Radio, check out:

In a High School Lab, Glimpses of an Ancient Climate

You Can Lead a Kid to Water

My Brain on Ads