Top 6 teenage inventions that changed the world

Jack Andraka, 17 years old in Maryland (USA), invented a tool to detect pancreatic cancer. This invention was awarded the $75,000 Intel ISEF Gordon E Moore Prize. It's a simple but very effective test.

1. Braille printer

Shubham Banerjee.

Topping this list of inventions is Shubham Banerjee, an Indian-American. In 2014, at the age of 13, Shubham started building a machine called Braigo V1.0 with materials from Lego assembly toys combined with some components and computer software. Shubham used a Lego Mindstorms EV3 set and about $5 in hardware from Home Depot to do the job. Indeed, the Braigo V1.0 is significantly cheaper than other braille printers on the market, which typically cost over $2,000 per unit. Shubham founded startup Braigo Labs in 2015 with his parents.

2. Pedal-powered washing machine

Schoolgirl Remya Jose.

Schoolgirl Remya Jose, 14 years old from India, invented this device after her mother got sick and asked her to help her wash clothes. Initially, Jose researched how conventional washing machines worked to replace the machine's manual mechanism. After that, Jose and his father used some recycled bicycle parts to create a device that saves time and energy. Clothes will be placed inside the cage, along with hot water and washing powder, soaked for 10 minutes. Then, the user steps on the pedal to rotate the clothes inside the cage like riding a bicycle. This is a simple and smart invention for families in rural areas that have difficulty accessing normal washing machines.

3. Solutions to create clean water and generate electricity

Cynthia Sin Nga Lam.

Cynthia Sin Nga Lam, a Vietnamese-Australian female student, was a prominent face at the 2014 Google Science Fair by inventing the H2Pro machine. H2Pro has the following operating principle: using sunlight to decompose dirty compounds in water, while separating hydrogen gas - an element that will be converted into electricity. The machine solves both the problems of clean water and electricity generation with just one solution.

4. Self-disinfecting door handles

Sun Ming Wong and King Pong Li.

Sun Ming Wong, 17 years old, and King Pong Li, 18 years old, in Hong Kong (China), have invented a product that can help keep dangerous bacteria away, which is a self-disinfecting door handle. The product is considered by experts to be revolutionary in disease control and hygiene. The idea of ​​these two guys started when they realized that many objects that people touch every day such as door handles, supermarket cart handles, balcony handrails. contain a lot of bacteria. Since then, the two have sought to create a surface that can continuously self-sterilize.

After a long period of exploration, Sun and King discovered that the compound Titanium Dioxide is an excellent antibacterial agent. Therefore, they ground this compound into a fine powder to coat the door handle. As a result, the door handle has a sterilization efficiency of up to 99.8%. And what's worth noting is that the price of this product is only 13 USD/piece.

5. Device to warn patients with dementia from wandering

Kenneth Shinozuku and the device that warns people with lost memory.

Kenneth Shinozuku, 15 years old from New York, USA, won a $50,000 science prize for a wearable sensor device called Wearable sensor (WS). It has the ability to send alerts via mobile devices when a dementia patient leaves the bed. Kenneth Shinozuku's invention was inspired by his grandfather who suffered from Alzheimer's disease, especially when he often got out of bed in the middle of the night and injured himself.

6. Pancreatic cancer detection machine

Jack Andraka.

In 2011, Jack Andraka, 17 years old in Maryland (USA), invented a tool to detect pancreatic cancer. This invention was awarded the $75,000 Intel ISEF Gordon E Moore Prize. It's a simple but very effective test. To find the test, Jack Andraka first looked for the culprit, which was a protein detected at higher levels in patients positive for pancreatic cancer. Out of 8,000 proteins, Jack finally chose mesothelin. This is a protein that is overproduced in cases of pancreatic cancer.

As a next step, Jack Andraka asked Professor Anirban Maitra at Johns Hopkins University to test mesothelin. After a long and difficult time, Jack Andraka finally found the above test strip. It is 168 times faster, 400 times more sensitive than traditional methods, and especially cheap.