(Important note: The Google Science Fair Google+ page is now the official home of all news and announcements related to the competition. This blog will no longer be updated. Add the Science Fair to a circle today to find out about the 2013 competition, get tips about entering, and tune in to weekly hangouts with mentors, famous scientists, and more!)

At age 16, Louis Braille invented an alphabet for the blind. When she was 13, Ada Lovelace became fascinated with math and went on to write the first computer program. And at 18, Alexander Graham Bell started experimenting with sound and went on to invent the telephone. Throughout history many great scientists developed their curiosity for science at an early age and went on to make groundbreaking discoveries that changed the way we live.

Today, we’re launching the third annual Google Science Fair in partnership with CERN, the LEGO Group, National Geographic and Scientific American to find the next generation of scientists and engineers. We’re inviting students ages 13-18 to participate in the largest online science competition and submit their ideas to change the world.



For the past two years, thousands of students from more than 90 countries have submitted research projects that address some of the most challenging problems we face today. Previous winners tackled issues such as the early diagnosis of breast cancer, improving the experience of listening to music for people with hearing loss and cataloguing the ecosystem found in water. This year we hope to once again inspire scientific exploration among young people and receive even more entries for our third competition.

Here’s some key information for this year’s Science Fair:

• Students can enter the Science Fair in 13 languages.
• The deadline for submissions is April 30, 2013 at 11:59 pm PDT.
• In June, we’ll recognize 90 regional finalists (30 from the Americas, 30 from Asia Pacific and 30 from Europe/Middle East/Africa).
• Judges will then select the top 15 finalists, who will be flown to Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. for our live, final event on September 23, 2013.
• At the finals, a panel of distinguished international judges consisting of renowned scientists and tech innovators will select top winners in each age category (13-14, 15-16, 17-18). One will be selected as the Grand Prize winner.

Prizes for the 2013 Science Fair include a $50,000 scholarship from Google, a trip to the Galapagos with National Geographic Expeditions, experiences at CERN, Google or the LEGO Group and digital access to the Scientific American archives for the winner’s school for a year. Scientific American will also award a $50,000 Science in Action prize to one project that makes a practical difference by addressing a social, environmental or health issue. We’re also introducing two new prizes for 2013:

• In August, the public will have the opportunity to get to know our 15 finalists through a series of Google+ Hangouts on Air and will then vote for the Inspired Idea Award—an award selected by the public for the project with the greatest potential to change the world.
• We also recognize that behind every great student there’s often a great teacher and a supportive school, so this year we’ll award a $10,000 cash grant from Google and an exclusive Google+ Hangout with CERN to the Grand Prize winner’s school.

Lastly, we’ll also be hosting a series of Google+ Hangouts on Air. Taking place on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, these Hangouts will feature renowned scientists including inventor Dean Kamen and oceanographic explorer Fabien Cousteau, showcase exclusive behind-the-scenes tours of cutting-edge labs and science facilities, and provide access to judges and the Google Science Fair team. We hope these Google+ Hangouts will help inspire, mentor and support students throughout the competition and beyond.

Visit www.googlesciencefair.com to get started now—your idea might just change the world.

Posted by Sam Peter, Google Science Fair Team

Twenty-one of the world’s brightest young scientists gathered at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View today to celebrate their achievements and present their projects to a panel of renowned judges at the Google Science Fair finals. Chosen from thousands of projects from more than 100 countries, these top 15 projects impressed the judges and public with their breadth of topics: from cancer research to vertical farming, 3D electronics to dementia. It was a tough decision, but we’re proud to name these three projects the winners of this year’s Google Science Fair:

• 13-14 age category: Jonah Kohn (USA)—“Good Vibrations: Improving the Music Experience for People with Hearing Loss Using Multi-Frequency Tactile Sound.” By creating a device that converts sound into tactile vibrations, Jonah’s project attempts to provide the hearing impaired with an improved experience of music.
• 15-16 age category: Iván Hervías Rodríguez, Marcos Ochoa and Sergio Pascual (Spain)—“La Vida Oculta del Agua (The Secret Life of Water).” Iván, Marcos and Sergio studied hidden microscopic life in fresh water, documenting the organisms that exist in a drop of water, and how those organisms influence our environment.
• 17-18 age category AND Grand Prize Winner: Brittany Wenger (USA)—“Global Neural Network Cloud Service for Breast Cancer.” Brittany’s project harnesses the power of the cloud to help doctors accurately diagnose breast cancer. Brittany built an application that compares individual test results to an extensive dataset stored in the cloud, allowing doctors to assess tumors using a minimally-invasive procedure. 

Each of the winners will receive prizes from Google and our Science Fair partners: CERN, LEGO, National Geographic and Scientific American. This evening, we also recognized Sakhiwe Shongwe and Bonkhe Mahlalela, from Swaziland, the winners of the Scientific American Science in Action award.

The judges were impressed with the quality of all the projects this year—and by the ingenuity, dedication and passion of the young scientists who created them. We applaud every contestant who submitted a project to the 2012 Google Science Fair and look forward to seeing the innovations, inventions and discoveries of young scientists in the years to come.


Posted by Cristin Frodella, Google in Education

Last week, Shree Bose, the grand prize winner of the 2011 Google Science Fair, traveled to CERN headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland as part of the grand prize. We invited Shree to write about her experience.

CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The name CERN is derived from the acronym for the French Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire.

“We got it.” The Director General paused, and the cramped room I was in burst into applause. Chills ran up my spine, as I looked around at the faces of the people of CERN who had worked for years to hear those three words. A particle similar in properties to the expected Higgs Boson had been found. And I had been at CERN to see its discovery announced to the world.

Shree Bose in the ALICE Cavern. Photo source: http://alicematters.web.cern.ch/shree_bose

Tim Vernes-Lee first came up with his proposal for the world wide web while working at CERN, a one page paper with a typed diagram showing his framework that is still on display today in the visitor center. His professor at the time scribbled three words at the top in black ink, three words that would go on to describe so much more than he could have ever imagined - “vague but exciting.” Making history is what CERN does best.

My ten days at CERN were full of learning more about physics than I had ever learned in my life, from people who were passionate and excited about the work they were doing. With a 27 km long collider complete with four huge detectors, particle physicists and engineers were often seen walking around wearing construction equipment and hard hats. It usually took me a second before I remembered that they were working on the subatomic scale, colliding protons at close to the speed of light. From these collisions, these physicists were recreating the conditions of the collisions, figuring out what particles were being released and eventually bringing us one step closer to understanding where we began, what we are made of, and where the universe is going.

And there couldn’t have been a better time to visit. During a technical stop the first week, we were able to go down to the detectors, these behemoth four story machines where the proton-proton collisions happen and are recorded, and down to the tunnel where the beam pipe was right beside us. It was hard to believe that, when the collider was running, clusters of protons were shot through at close to the speed of light. Some of the coldest temperatures in the universe, required for the superconducting magnets to function, were achieved by liquefying helium. We got to visit the computer farms, where thousands of computers hummed, processing massive amounts of data recorded by the detectors. We met people who were creating antimatter which annihilated upon contact with matter just as they did in the moments after the Big Bang, talked to a theoretical physicist about dark matter, learned about proton-gluon plasma created from colliding heavy ions from the people of the ALICE experiment, learned about the beauty particle at the LHCb project, and found out what ATLAS and CMS were doing to find evidence for the Higgs Boson.

During the weekends, we got to go sightseeing, visiting Chamonix, a beautiful small mountain village in the French Alps, and across Lake Geneva to visit the medieval castles of Yvoire. During one evening, we ate a delicious home-cooked meal of pasta and seafood with our wonderful CERN guide, Silvano de Gennaro, in his house he had renovated from an old barn in the Jurra Mountains overlooking Geneva as a full moon hung over the cloudless sky. His wife, Michelle, was a member of Les Horribles Cernettes, a musical group whose album cover had been the first picture on the internet, and we got to see videos of the de Genarro family band rocking out. Perfect moments like that are just so surreal.

The day before the seminar, you could feel the energy among the people of CERN as people excitedly whispered amongst themselves about their plans for the next day. I was sitting in the communications office when Peter Higgs, one of the physicists behind the creation of the standard model, came in for an interview. When asked about the upcoming announcement of the results, he said he couldn’t believe he was alive to see this day. I couldn’t believe I was watching history be made right before me.

After the seminar and the press conference we got to sit in on, it was a whirlwind of visiting experiments specialized on the medical applications of the technologies, and before we knew it, we had said goodbye to Silvano while standing in the rain at CERN, and it was the morning of our flight. As our plane took off, headed first to London and then to DFW, I couldn’t help thinking about how much I’d learned - about the physics, about its potential for the the future, and most of all, about the power of the group effort at CERN. One mind alone is an incredible thing. But so many minds working together can really do the impossible. I guess the world of particle physics and the entire future of science is, as three simple words can put it, vague but exciting.

Shree Bose and her family in the LHC tunnel. Photo source: http://alicematters.web.cern.ch/shree_bose

You can read more about Shree’s trip here.


- The Google Science Fair Team

Editor's note: We've invited guest blogger Jemma Best to provide feedback from the judges. Jemma is a project manager from EdComs, the organization that coordinated the judging process.

After months of planning and preparation, the judging team was raring to go when the submission deadline for the 2012 competition finally arrived.

The preliminary judges enjoyed a hectic but fascinating April reading thousands of amazing entries submitted by young scientists in over one hundred countries to identify 90 outstanding regional finalists. The judges felt that the overall standard this year was even higher than in 2011, with more entries of very high quality to evaluate. In addition to scoring high in the judging criteria, the judges found that the best entries also:

• surprised and excited the judges
• were inspiring and clearly expressed
• demonstrated meticulous scientific method
• adhered to the judging criteria for each section
• clearly addressed the question and hypothesis
• could make a positive difference
• demonstrated the entrants’ enthusiasm for their work

In May, academics and experts from high profile scientific organizations met in London to evaluate and select the 15 exceptional individuals or teams with the highest scoring projects, who will be flown to Google headquarters in California for a celebratory Science Fair event and the final round of judging. Selecting the top 15 from such a strong pool was both an honor and a real challenge for our panel, who went away inspired by the entrants’ achievements.

We’re very excited about meeting the top 15 in California, where the judges will select the Google Science Fair 2012 winners.

Jemma Best
Google Science Fair Judging Panel Coordinator

It’s been a fascinating two weeks for our Google Science Fair judges. They’ve been reviewing projects which try to solve myriad problems—from helping people with hearing loss enjoy music to saving water with vacuflush toilets—and they’ve been blown away by the inventiveness of the world’s young scientists. Today, they’ve selected 15 finalists from our top 90 regional finalists. All of these students asked interesting questions; many focused on real-world problems and some produced groundbreaking science that challenged current conventions.

After much deliberation we’re happy to announce the 15 finalists:

Age 13 - 14
Sumit Singh, India
Sakhiwe Shongwe and Bonkhe Mahlalela, Swaziland
Alexy Klozkov and Milena Klimenko, Ukraine
Martin Schneider and Joshua Li, USA
Jonah Kohn, USA

Age 15 - 16
Rohit Fenn, India
Iván Hervías Rodríguez, Marcos Ochoa and Sergio Pascua, Spain
Sabera Talukder, USA
Catherine Wong, USA
Kimberley Yu and Phillip Yu, USA

Age 17 - 18
Yassine Bouanane, Canada
Raghavendra Ramachanderan, India
Melvin Zammit, Malta
Brittany Wenger, USA
Yamini Naidu, USA

In July, these finalists will be coming to Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., to present their projects to our international panel of finalist judges and compete for prizes that include $100,000 in scholarship funds, a trip to the Galapagos Islands and more. The winners will be announced at our celebration gala beginning at 7:00 p.m. PDT July 23 and the event will be streamed live on our YouTube channel, so make sure to tune in.

In addition, this year one of our partners, Scientific American, is awarding a special Science in Action prize to a project that addresses a social, environmental, ethical, health or welfare issue to make a practical difference to the lives of a group or community. After careful deliberation by Scientific American’s independent judging panel, we are thrilled to announce that Sakhiwe Shongwe and Bonkhe Mahlalela from Swaziland are the winners of this award for their project, which explores an affordable way to provide hydroponics to poor subsistence farmers. In addition to the $50,000 in prize funds, Shongwe and Bonkhe will have access to a year’s mentorship to explore how their project can help the lives of subsistence farmers in Swaziland and around the world. They are also still in the running for their age category prize and the grand prize.  

Congratulations to all the finalists and the Scientific American Science in Action winners.  We look forward to meeting you all at Google in July.

Sam Peter, Google Science Fair Team

Congratulations to the regional finalists of the second Google Science Fair! These top 90 entries from around the world represent some incredibly innovative and groundbreaking science.

This year’s competition was even more international and diverse than last year. We had thousands of entries from more than 100 countries, and topics ranging from improving recycling using LEGO robots to treating cancer with a substance created by bees to tackling meth abuse. Our judges were impressed by the quality of the projects, and it was no easy task to evaluate the creativity, scientific merit and global relevance of each submission to narrow down the entries to just 90 finalists.

Thirteen of our 90 finalists have also been nominated for the Scientific American Science in Action award, the winner of which will be announced on June 6 along with our 15 finalists. These top 15 and the Science in Action winner will be flown out to Google’s headquarters in California in July for our celebratory finalist event and for the last round of judging, which will be conducted by our panel of renowned scientists and innovators.

Now, let’s get excited for the results!

The regional finalists in each of the three age categories are:

ASIA (Age 13 - 14)
Sadanand Patil, India
Utkarsh Gupta, India
Anjan Venkatesh, India
Aravind Muraleedharan, India
Nitya Raju, India
Aditya Jain, India
Sumit Singh, India
Ayushi Khedkar, Shraddha Kukade, Pournima Shinde, India
Nihar dalal, India
Shravan Patankar, Abhishek Dedhe, India

ASIA (Age 15 - 16)
Ivan Jie Xiong Ang, Malaysia
Marco Ochsner, Ludwig Hruza, Singapore
Edith Loo, Li Yin Tan, Singapore
Rohit Fenn, India
Hamza Azhar, Pakistan
Benjamin Chan, Paul Jeanbart, Singapore
Xi Xu, China
Scott Guan, Cher Yeoh, China
May Ning Law, Shi Hui Ang, Ruixin Ng, Singapore
Akshat Boobna, India

ASIA (Age 17 - 18) 
Shaoxiong Luo, Singapore
Mark Borris Aldonza, Philippines
Geoffrey Tanudjaja, Singapore
Michael Teoh, Singapore
Shan Tan, Singapore
Wenqing Yan, Ronghui He, Singapore
Chung Kyu Kim, Ho Shin Cho, Joo Hee Lee, South Korea
Raghavendra Ramachanderan, India
Kay Yi Low, Singapore
Wataru Ogasa, Takeshi Kitagawa, Youta Nakagawa, Japan

EMEA (Age 13 - 14)
Sakhiwe Shongwe, Bonkhe Mahlalela, Swaziland
Carlos Vega García, Spain
Natanel Levis, Israel
Marcin Pitek, Poland
Ana María Santos Espósito, Spain
India Hannon, Naomh Hannon, Isabelle Bond, England
Isabel Medrano Sáinz, Spain
Anthony Carmoy, France
Alexey Kozlov, Milena Klimenko, Ukraine
Ralph Moran, Ireland

EMEA (Age 15 - 16)
Artem Mosiyenko, Javed Lindner, Germany
Mohammed Al Eydan, Saudi Arabia
Pablo González Recio, Alvaro Cuevas Alvarez, Alejandro Sánchez Lechón, Spain
Shahd Al Jasser, Saudi Arabia
Iván Hervías Rodríguez, Marcos Ochoa, Sergio Pascual, Spain
Gonzalo Balbás Moñivas, Spain
Judith Calvo Rull, Spain
Omar Obeya, Egypt
Karsten Roth, Germany
Menna AbdelGawad, Saudi Arabia

EMEA (Age 17 - 18)
Danijar Hafner, Germany
Eugen Hruska, Germany
Till Speicher, Paul Georg Wagner, Germany
Ibrahim Khalil, Egypt
Eduardo Sancho Calzada, Alejandra Bargues Carot, Laura García Marco, Spain
Muireasa Carroll, Mairéad Kingston, Denise Hurley, Ireland
Melvin Zammit, Malta
Abdallah Reda, Egypt
Adrián Díaz, Sandra Garrido Romero, Spain
Philip Glass, Callum Middleton, England

The Americas (Age 13 - 14)
Kriti Lall, USA
Anirudh Jain, USA
Jonah Kohn, USA
Mark Liang, USA
Andrew Chen, USA
Raymond Wang, Canada
Garima Singh, USA
Arjun Mahajan, Maya Flannery, Jonathan Berman, USA
Suruchi Ramanujan, USA
Martin Schneider, Joshua Li, USA

The Americas (Age 15 - 16)
Kimberley Yu, Phillip Yu, USA
Natalie Ng, USA
Rishabh Mazmudar, USA
Emily S. Wang, Trevor Wang, USA
Joshua Meier, USA
Catherine Wong, USA
Katherine Zimmerman, USA
Sabera Talukder, USA
Grace Brosofsky, USA
Alejandro Andres Fuentes Herrera, Chille

The Americas (Age 17 - 18)
Daniel Wang, USA
Brittany Wenger, USA
Yamini Naidu, USA
Karen Resnick, USA
Grace Pan, USA
Yuhao (Danny) Huang, Canada
Blake Smith, Vickram Gidwani, USA
Pascal Gendron, Canada
Yassine Bouanane, Canada
Ricardo Enrique Alba Torres, Jessica Alba Torres, Colombia

The Scientific American Science in Action Award nominations are:
Anjan Venkatesh, India
Sumit Singh, India
Geoffrey Tanudjaja, Singapore
Sakhiwe Shongwe, Swaziland
Carlos Vega García, Spain
Mena Abdel Gawad, Saudi Arabia
Mark Liang, USA
Andrew Chen, USA
Catherine Wong, USA
Sabera Talukder, USA
Grace Brosofsky, USA
Ricardo Enrique Alba Torres, Jessica Alba Torres, Colombia
Katherine Zimmerman, USA

Thanks to all of the students around the world who submitted projects to the Google Science Fair and congratulations to all the young scientists who were selected as regional finalists.

Posted by: Sam Peter, Google Science Fair Team

Missed registration this year? Click here to sign up for a notification when registration opens for the Google Science Fair 2013.

Last week,  Shree Bose, the 2011 grand prize winner of Google Science Fair, traveled to the Galapagos with National Geographic Expeditions as part of the grand prize. We invited Shree to write about her experience in the capital. - Ed.

Two deep chocolate eyes stared into mine as I stood a few inches away, paralyzed in the beauty of the moment and at the unique, amazing creature before me. Wrinkled eyelids drowsily closed before slowly opening again to reveal eyes that seemed to hold the wisdom of the 160 years the tortoise had been alive. He looked about at the group of tourists close enough to touch him and showed no fear, dipping his head down by his leathery neck to chomp on some more grass and the bright green poison apples only tortoises can eat. As I quietly backed away, the tortoise looked up with a bored expression before heaving up his patterned swirled shell eroding with time and ambling away in the other direction for more food. I was in the Galapagos. 




There's a huge difference between reading about a place like the Galapagos in school textbooks and actually visiting it. I road on a rubber boat motoring around the islands of the Galapagos and felt the salt water of the Pacific spraying up against my skin. I felt the red sands of the Rabida Island between my toes, and walked straight up to a giant Galapagos tortoise to say hello. I was no longer reading about a place, but experiencing it first hand. 

The ten days in the Galapagos were like stepping into a different world. I had heard that animals on this island would not show any fear because they have very few natural predators, but I had no idea what to expect. I met vibrant red, Sally Lightfoot crabs, blue footed boobies I had learned about since freshman year, Galapagos tortoises, and Darwin finches. Sea lions played happily on beaches, close enough to chase me, and one did.  A marine iguana, one of those species found nowhere else in the world, climbed up to me, its face less than a feet away before cocking his head sideways to regard me. A blue footed booby dove down into the water for fish a few feet away from the kayak my brother and I were paddling, before surfacing and coming up to our kayak and pecking on it. I come from a city where it isn't possible to get within a few feet of any bird. But there, even the tiniest of birds, like mockingbirds and finches, hopped about within a foot of our legs as we walked by. We went snorkeling in the clear, beautiful Pacific Ocean and I saw schools of brilliant fish and even a solitary turtle in there. I looked down once and realized I was directly above a school of eagle rays a few feet below, and once, I even looked down to see the shadow of a shark swimming away. 

Shree with Marine Iguanas 

The Galapagos are special for several reasons. One is that they’re so isolated, a place where humans haven't had a great impact on the natural environments. Another is the biodiversity. This island chain lies at the crossroads of three currents that carried in a wide variety of species—in fact, there are lots of species here that cannot be found anywhere else in the world. A third is its scientific history. The Galapagos are where Darwin, during his 19 days on land there, noticed the incredible diversity of species and came up with his theory of natural selection and evolution. After ten days there, I realized all of these special things about the Galapagos, and decided to add one more: inspiration to keep exploring the amazing things our world has to offer and so much more beyond.


- Shree

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, we were all sitting around the campfire, looking up at the stars and wondering how we got here. Today, through the groundbreaking research at centers of science excellence like CERN, we are getting closer to answering some of mankind's fundamental questions. Recently, the Google Science Fair team visited CERN in Switzerland to see where one of our Google Science Fair winners will be spending time. At the home of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which CERN scientists are using to determine the origins of the universe, we truly felt the pulse of scientific discovery. We were inspired by the many scientists we spoke to who are trying to answer really big questions, like Archana Sharma, a physicist at CERN. Sharma reminds us in the CERN video below that, "It's important to keep asking questions because it's a sign of the health of society as a whole."

Science doesn’t have to be restricted to labs and million dollar research facilities. Inspiration for great projects can come from anywhere—a dedication to sailing, a passion for robots or a love of music. Speaking of science and music, on Thursday, March 8 at 2:30 PM PST, we will be hanging out with will.i.am on Google+. The Black Eyed Peas frontman will be talking about his passion for science and how it fuels his creativity. To join us for the hangout with will.i.am, follow the Google Science Fair on Google+ and stay tuned for updates.

The second annual Google Science Fair is in full swing, and the deadline for submissions is April 1, 2012. To ask your question, visit google.com/sciencefair. We look forward to seeing great projects from the four corners of the globe again this year!

The Google Science Fair Team

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

Are human beings born curious, or can curiosity be nurtured through environment, competition or a good teacher? Everyone’s got a question—that’s ours. But we’re sure you’ve got tons of questions, too. Today, we’re inviting students around the world to pose their most pressing questions about the world around them and answer those questions through scientific inquiry.

Along with our partners CERN, The LEGO Group, National Geographic and Scientific American, today we’re launching the second annual Google Science Fair, the largest online science competition in the world, open globally to students ages 13-18. Either individually or in teams of up to three people, students pose a question, develop a hypothesis and conduct science experiments to test it. The entire process is detailed and submitted online, via a website template participants fill out themselves, so all you need to participate is curiosity, an Internet connection and a browser.

Last year, we received entries that strove to solve a wide variety of needs, from “How can I cure cancer?” to “Can I teach a robot to learn English?” to “Can I build a faster sailboat?” The breadth and depth of these projects was incredibly impressive, and this year we hope to see even more entries from the next generation of brilliant young scientists.

This year’s fair will be even more global than the last: We’re now accepting submissions in 13 languages (Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Spanish and Russia). We will also be recognizing 90 regional finalists (30 from the Americas, 30 from the Asia Pacific and 30 from Europe/Middle East/Africa). From these 90, to be announced in May, our judges will select the top 15 finalists, who will be flown to Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. for our live Google Science Fair final event on July 23, 2012. At the finals, a panel of distinguished international judges (like Vint Cerf, Sylvia Earle and Nobel Laureates David Gross and Ada Yonath) will select top winners in each age category (13-14, 15-16, 17-18).

We’re also introducing a new category for this year’s competition—the Scientific American Science in Action award. We were so inspired by 2011 finalist Harine Ravichandran’s project, which attempted to solve energy surges in rural villages, that we decided to recognize an outstanding project that addresses a social, environmental or health need to make a difference in the lives of a group or community, as Harine’s project did for her grandparents’ village in India. The winner will also be flown to Mountain View for the finalist event in July.

The Google Science Fair opens today, January 12, worldwide, and we’ll accept submissions until Sunday, April 1 at 11:59 GMT (or 6:59pm ET/3:59pm PT). In addition to satisfying your curious mind, your brilliant project can also help to win you some pretty cool prizes, like a $50,000 college scholarship from Google, a 10-day trip to the Galapagos Islands with a National Geographic Explorer or an internship at Google or any one of our partners. Our Scientific American Science in Action award winner will earn $50,000 and year-long mentorship to make their project goal a reality.

The winners of last year’s inaugural Google Science Fair became something like scientific rock stars. Shree Bose, Naomi Shah and Lauren Hodge met with President Obama, were invited to speak at big events like TEDx Women and were featured in Wired magazine. Shree, our grand prize winner, was named one of Glamour magazine’s 21 Amazing Young Women of the Year. White House visits and Glamour aside, every student in the Google Science Fair has the chance to do hands-on research that can truly change the world.

Visit google.com/sciencefair and ask your most burning questions at the top of your voice for the world to hear. Google itself was founded through experimentation and with the Google Science Fair, we hope to inspire scientific exploration among the next generation of scientists and engine

(Cross-posted on the Google Student blog and the Official Google blog)

Last week, 17-year-old Shree Bose from Fort Worth, Texas, the grand prize winner of the Google Science Fair, visited Washington, D.C. at the invitation of the White House. We invited Shree to write about her experience in the capitol. - Ed.

Adrenaline. I turned around as the brilliantly polished door behind me opened, and suddenly I was face to face with a man I’d seen so many times on television. The President of the United States calmly extended his hand to shake mine and those of Naomi and Lauren, the other two winners of Google’s first-ever Science Fair. He knew about our projects and was genuinely excited to talk with us.

The Oval Office is more than just a room. It has a palpable aura of grandeur, with the presidential seal in the center of the deep blue carpet and a portrait of George Washington hanging on the wall. The desk, where presidents of the past have contemplated some of the most important decisions in the world’s history, was polished to a gleam. President Obama leaned against it as he talked to us.

He asked us how we became interested in science, what our plans were for the future and which colleges we were interested in. Smiling, he told us to stick with science. We left the Oval Office feeling like our individual futures were important to the nation’s future; like we could change the world.

Our trip to Washington, D.C., also included visits to the National Institute of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Over our two days, we were given the opportunity to sit down and talk with many of our country’s leaders who have not only been extraordinarily successful in the fields we wish to go into in the future, but who also encouraged us to follow our own dreams. It was more than just meetings; it was inspiration.

Naomi Shah, Shree Bose and Lauren Hodge meet President Obama in the Oval Office

Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

Posted by Shree Bose, Google Science Fair winner

Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog


Yesterday, our top 15 Google Science Fair finalists descended on Google’s headquarters and wowed our luminary judges—as well as more than 1,000 local attendees plus Googlers who stopped by to check out the action. Our exhibit hall was buzzing with energy and excitement as everyone wondered which young scientists would go home with our top prizes.

The results are in—and this year was all about girl power. Our top three winners by age category are:

• Lauren Hodge in the 13-14 age group. Lauren studied the effect of different marinades on the level of potentially harmful carcinogens in grilled chicken.
  
  
• Naomi Shah in the 15-16 age group. Naomi endeavored to prove that making changes to indoor environments that improve indoor air quality can reduce people’s reliance on asthma medications.
  
  
• Shree Bose in the 17-18 age group. Shree discovered a way to improve ovarian cancer treatment for patients when they have built up a resistance to certain chemotherapy drugs.
  
  

Winners (from left to right): Lauren Hodge, Shree Bose, Naomi Shah We also awarded one Grand Prize and the Grand Prize Winner is...Shree Bose; congratulations!
Our judges said the unifying elements of all three young women were their intellectual curiosity, their tenaciousness and their ambition to use science to find solutions to big problems. They examined complex problems and found both simple solutions that can be implemented by the general public—like changing your cooking habits or removing toxins from your home—as well as more complex solutions that can be addressed in labs by doctors and researchers, such as Shree’s groundbreaking discovery, which could have wider implications for cancer research.
The winners took home prizes furnished by Google and our partners CERN, LEGO and National Geographic. Shree received a $50,000 scholarship, a trip to the Galápagos Islands with a National Geographic Explorer and aninternship at CERN. Naomi and Lauren each received $25,000 scholarships and internships at Google and LEGO. All three were awarded lifetime digital subscriptions to Scientific American. Beyond the grand prizes, everyone went home with some pretty cool loot, along with plenty of photos and memories that we hope will last a lifetime. If you’d like to watch last night’s events, including a speech from our chairman, Eric Schmidt, and presentations from judges Dean Kamen and Tierney Thys, you can find video on our YouTube channel.
On behalf of Google, our partners and science lovers everywhere, we’d like to thank all of our finalists and everyone who submitted a project to the inaugural Google Science Fair. We are humbled by your ingenuity, your dedication and your skill. We are heartened to know that our future is in the capable hands of our young scientists—young men and women who tackle big ideas to bring significant, actionable change to the world.
If you’d like information about next year’s Google Science Fair, let us know and we’ll be in touch soon, or keep an eye on the Google Science Fair site for regular updates.
Posted by Cristin Frodella, Google Education Team

Editors notes: We invited Katrina Guido, age 15, a freshman at Emmaus High School in Pennsylvania and one of our Google Science Fair semi finalists, to write a blog post about the encouragement she received from her biology teacher to enter the Google Science Fair and what she learned from this experience. Katrina is actively involved in many of the opportunities her school offers including Biology Olympics and Olympiad, her school newspaper, and the tennis team.


When my biology teacher, Mr. Keith Butler, presented my class with the opportunity to compete in the Google Science Fair, I thought it would be just another science competition. Traditionally, my school district requires honors students to complete an in-depth experiment, and then teachers are supposed to encourage students to participate in competitions which require a prepared presentation with overheads or an informal interview and trifold board.

I am thankful Mr. Butler encouraged all competitions using various methods of presentations and that he offered us this specific opportunity. Not every teacher would take the time to search out the numerous competitions that he had.

I was intrigued by the idea of using a new method of presentation for the Google Fair because well, lets face it, printing off overheads without smudging them requires a special gift. I loved the idea of using a website to present because the web is something with which I as a student am very familiar and can easily use.

As I researched further and further as to what the Google Science Fair was, it dawned on me. Here was an opportunity to share my data with scientists from all over the globe. The judges were people who had received a different and more in depth educations than I, but still shared my enthusiastic love of science. Just to have the ability to share my data with them was awe-inspiring.

Once I found out that my project had been chosen for the semi-final round, I was shocked. To be chosen as one of 60 out of over 7,500 was spectacular.

The smile on my teacher's face made the experience even better. Mr. Butler sent the link to vote for the People's Choice Award to just about everyone he knew and even a few people he didn't. The most prominent memory in my mind is of when he took the students (including me) to the state competition of the Junior Academy of Science. Wherever he went, whoever he met, he was proud to tell them to vote for his student who was a semi-finalist in the Google Science Fair. I heard feedback from so many people in my community who I had never known had such a prominent interest in science.

My experiment was purposely rather unorthodox. After having sat in a room for three hours listening to basically the same project testing vitamin C about six or so times, one starts to see all of the challenges that no one seems to know how to overcome, such as a lack of quantitative data. Basically, I wanted to fix previous errors but still keep the experiment rather simple, so I built a photospectrometer out of a card board box, an LED pen light, and a Lego robotics unit to measure the difference in color shade of a vitamin C color-indicator test.

I am always asked why I chose to use a Lego instead of an actual light meter and well, to put it plainly, that would have been boring, and not everyone has access to a traditional light meter. When formulating my method, I remembered the time my family went to Lego Land and programmed Lego robots to follow a black line and find and push foam balls into a bucket. The unit used to sense the black lines was obviously sensing a difference in light and this just so happened to apply to my experiment.

Mr. Butler is retiring this year and to be able to credit him with introducing me to this opportunity and with providing me with the knowledge, support, and independence needed to design my experiment is the best retirement gift I could hope to offer. Thanks to him my passion for science is stronger than ever. Thanks in part to him and also the other amazing projects which reached the semi-final round, I have already started thinking about my project for next year. I was inspired to begin searching for a laboratory with which I can work in order to conduct more in-depth research because I want to use science to improve the world.

Participating in the Google Science Fair has given me the ability to share my data and knowledge with the world and to view the ideas of other teenage science enthusiasts from different countries. Google has given me the opportunity of a lifetime and for that I am thankful.

Katrina Guido

Editor's note: We've invited guest blogger Christina Baker, former science teacher, visiting lecturer in Psychology at the University of Westminster in London and our Google Science Fair Judging Panel Coordinator to provide some general feedback about all the great science fair projects that were submitted.

The Google Science Fair judging panel is made up of an international team of scientific experts from a wide range of fields, from biology, physics and chemistry to computer science. We hope you enjoyed creating these projects as much as we enjoyed reviewing them!"

As this is the Google Science Fair’s first year, the judging team didn’t know what to expect. The judges were impressed with entrants’ ability to use both imagination and sound research methods to conduct their investigations, and also found their enthusiasm for their chosen topics very inspiring. There was also good evidence of effective teamwork, as Google Sites enabled entrants to work together without having to be in the same room... or even the same country!

The standard of entries was extremely high. One judge commented: “I've just judged a project that has absolutely blown me away... It was so good I had to take a break for a cup of tea before judging a few more!”

With over 7,500 entries from all over the world, it would be impossible for judges to provide individual feedback to entrants, but we have provided some key points that apply to all.

The best entrants...

• Explored original or imaginative ideas
• Communicated their thinking clearly and engagingly
• Were meticulous about their scientific method
• Followed the Science Fair rules
• Made sure that all teammates had parental permission
• Made sure that website and presentation permissions were viewable (i.e. not set to ‘Private’)
• Read and addressed all the criteria for each section
• Made sure there was a clear idea linking their project together (so that the experiment and conclusion clearly addressed the question and hypothesis)
• Explained how their work could make a positive difference to the world
• Allowed their love of science to shine through in their project

It was clear from the projects as a whole that the future world will be in good hands with the next generation of very talented young scientists!

Christina Baker
Google Science Fair Judging Panel Coordinator

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog and Google Student Blog)

From winged keels to water turbines, from prosthetic limbs to programming in pure English, it’s been a fascinating two weeks for our Google Science Fair judges. It was no easy task to select 15 finalists out of the 60 semi-finalists—all of the students’ projects asked interesting questions, many focused on real-world problems and some produced groundbreaking science that challenged current conventions.

After much deliberation we're happy to announce the 15 finalists:

Age 13 - 14
Anand Srinivasan, USA
Daniel Arnold, USA
Lauren Hodge, USA
Luke Taylor, South Africa
Michelle Guo, USA

Age 15 - 16
Dora Chen, USA
Gavin Ovsak, USA
Harine Ravichandran, India
Naomi Shah, USA
Skanda Koppula, USA

Age 17 - 18
Christopher Neilsen, Canada
Matthew Morris, USA
Shaun Lim Hsien Yang, Singapore
Shree Bose, USA
Vighnesh Leonardo Shiv, USA

In July, these finalists will come to Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. to present their projects to our panel of finalist judges, including science luminaries, technology innovators and one Nobel laureate. They'll compete for prizes that include $100,000 in scholarship funds, real-life experiences at CERN, Google, LEGO and Scientific American, and a trip to the Galapagos Islands courtesy of National Geographic Expeditions. The winners will be announced at our celebration gala that same evening, beginning at 6:00 p.m. PDT July 11. The event will be streamed live on our YouTube channel so make sure to tune in.

In addition, over the past two weeks people around the world have had the opportunity to vote for their favorite projects in our online voting gallery. We have had over 100,000 votes and the competition was really tight, but we’re happy to announce that Nimal Subramanian is the People’s Choice Award winner. Nimal will receive a $10,000 scholarship. Congratulations Nimal—the public really loved your project!

Congratulations to all the finalists and the People’s Choice Award winner. We look forward to meeting the finalists at Google in July.

Samantha Peter, Education Team

“Science is cool,” my 10-year-old daughter said to me this morning. I asked her why she thought that. “Do we need to have a reason?” she fired back with a smile. After I stopped laughing, I thought about what she said, and I realized something.

I’m not a scientist, but in my house, science is just part of everyday life. When the kids have questions, we talk about the science behind the things they’re wondering about. We often do fun things together that involve science—from activity kits to nature walks to visiting science museums. So it’s obvious to my two girls why science matters.

But most parents don’t happen to brush against the world of science everyday as the editor in chief of Scientific American, as I am—and most of them didn’t get science degrees either. Studies have shown that attitudes about science and scientists form at a young age. If kids get turned off to science at a young age, they may never come back. How can non-scientist parents easily foster a love of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM)? That’s where Bring Science Home comes in!

Every weekday for the month of May, Scientific American is posting a free science activity online for parents and their 6-to-12 year-olds to enjoy together. We worked with members of the National Science Teachers Association to create material based on the National Science Education Standards, so the weekly themes echo what kids learn in younger grades. The Bring Science Home activities are fun and easy, and you can do them in less than an hour—usually with things you already have around the house. With summer coming up, they’re also handy to entertain young minds over the long break.

This initiative is part of Bridge to Science, Nature Publishing Group's participation in the Change the Equation partnership and the White House's Educate to Innovate campaign. You can read more about that here.

So we say: Bring Science Home! Because science belongs in the home.

Posted by: Mariette DiChristina, Editor-in-Chief Scientific American