High School Inventors 2011 | Popular Science
High School Inventors
Rachel FrankIn between pep rallies and history tests, these 10 brainy students are refining cancer treatments, cleaning up car exhaust systems, and improving communication between humans and robots.
ALLISON DANA BICK
Age: 17
Allison Dana Brick: Jonie Schwartz
High School: Millburn High School, Millburn, N.J.
Invention: Smartphone water-quality testerWhen Alison Dana Bick was in middle school, a downpour swamped the streets of her hometown and flooded its well. Public officials warned that flooding might have carried sewage into the water supply. “My friend called to ask if there was a way to check the safety of the tap water,” Bick says. When a Google search revealed that there wasn’t any fast and easy household test, she decided to create one. Four years later, she completed work on a cellphone application that determines the concentration of bacteria in a photographed sample of water. Unlike current water-testing kits that take 18 hours to evaluate the full chemical and bacterial content of a sample, Bick’s cellphone test provides a simple answer—contaminated or safe to drink—immediately. Bick knew that Colilert-18, one of the most common water-quality testing agents, turned yellow when mixed with bacteria-contaminated water; the more the bacteria, the darker the hue. So she developed an algorithm to read [...]
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