 Welcome to Think Tech on OC16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things that matter to tech and Hawaii. I'm Raya Salter. And I'm Elise Anderson. In our show This Time, we'll cover the 2017 Hawaii State Science and Engineering Fair at the Hawaii Convention Center. We'll walk the floor, we'll check out the exhibits, and we'll talk with the amazing kids and visitors who are there. With all the exuberant kids, and all the parents, teachers, judges, and visitors who came to celebrate the kids, the fair, and science, some say it was the best science fair ever. Here are some of the kids we talked to. You'll really enjoy them. They're charming and dedicated to science. They're Hawaii's future. Meo Diaz, and I go to Kaimiki Middle School. I'm in the seventh grade, and then I did my project about athlete's foot. I wanted to find an effective home remedy for it, because home remedies are safer, cheaper, and more accessible than conventional medicines. Athlete's foot is caused by Cantonese. So to test the five different remedies I tested, I tested them on yeast. So the five home remedies that I tested were baking soda, apple cider vinegar, epsom salt, hydrogen peroxide, and tea tree essential oil. The most effective was the apple cider vinegar and the baking soda, and the least effective was the epsom salt. Hi, I'm Patricia Saiki, and I am from Hilo Intermediate. So my project is basically about just seeing how dirty our school is by testing the doorknobs. Well, usually I see kids picking their nose or scratching something, and then grabbing the door, and then I have to grab it behind them, and I'm like, I don't want to do that. So I just decided maybe I could show them how dirty what they're doing to it, and how many people touch that, and what's going on. So I just picked four doors, and then I did the door handles, because that's what's used most. I found out that the bathroom stalls and the D101 room, which is a classroom, had the most bacteria, and then the cafeteria and teacher's lounge had the least, which was really surprising, because I expected the cafeteria door to be dirtiest, but I wasn't. And I think the teacher's lounge is actually being cleaned more than the kids. I'm pretty sure that's what's going on, because they're the cleanest. My name is Jessica Logan. And I'm Laura Osiako, and we're from Trinity Christian School, Kailua. So our purpose is to determine whether or not the kinetic energy of a moving object changes as the function of its mass. Okay, so our hypothesis for our project was that if we add 7.5 grams of lead weight to this car, that'll travel 0.5 percent further every time we roll it down the track. And we predicted this because of our formula. Ke equals one-half mv squared, as you can see all around our board, and Ke stands for kinetic energy, m stands for mass, and v stands for velocity, and we square velocity. And our second part of our project was to measure the velocity of the car as it hits the bottom of the ramp, and we measure this by this motion detector, and this fancy calculator right here. And our prediction for that was 2.01 meters per second, using our same formula. We predicted that it was going to go 0.5 percent further on this, on the distance, and it went 0.62, so we were very close in our prediction and our results. My name is Christian, and I'm from Moanalua Middle School, and this is MediAlert, which is a solution to a problem many older people have, which is taking the medicine correctly and on time. Overdoses and underdoses is very dangerous and can cause many health effects later on. So my solution is a modification to the regular Pocase, which gives a visual and auditory alert, so it has leds, so they led up twice a day, and they show when you need to take your medicine. And also a buzzer that will give you a sound. I'm Claire Hughes, and I'm from Waikaea Intermediate. My project is about Rapidohia Death, which is a really big problem on the Big Island, and so it kills trees by getting into it and blocking the water from getting to its limbs, and it's a fungus. And so I just was liking to work with that because it's going to help my community, and I was really interested in it. So it just gets into the limbs and it just saturates all the water for itself. Peabark, they're looking at trees and forests and trying to find a cure, but there is no cure yet. I'm Julia Matsuzaki, and I'm from Waikaea Baptist Academy. How can I create liquid form water from the surrounding air around us? I was trying to think of a way of making water in a different point of view, and so I was thinking of making it from the surrounding around us, because in the air there's humidity and that when I take that and I put it into a device like this, the air starts to come, the air and then humidity starts to kind of stay over here, it collects water molecules and then it drops into this cup and then it starts to form water. So I used this electrical outlet, but I was thinking from my next step I would use a solar panel so that it would be able to use around the world and other places except just that. I'm Ian from Island Pacific Academy, and I chose the project because a lot of things in the news recently have been showing that terraforming can be done sooner and sooner, and so I wanted to do a project showing ways that we can terraform. So I simulated the environment on Mars and I showed that the Mars environment, it can be an even better place to grow plants than on Earth. Well in the soil there are some nutrients that can help plants grow better than on Earth. In the atmosphere the more carbon dioxide can help plants go through photosynthesis a lot better. Oh I'm Julianne Viernes and I'm from Waipahu Intermediate. This project is about the effect of temperature on the power of solar cells and I tested it by putting three different plates at different temperatures, one at ambient temperature, one at hot temperature and one in a chilled temperature and I placed solar cells on them so that the temperature of the plates would change the temperature of the cells. Then I would put the cells under the sun and then using a multimeter I would measure the voltage in the current and then using the formula voltage times current equals power I would find the power output. For the voltage it seemed that colder temperatures had higher voltages but then in current I didn't see as much of a trend there though I hope to see one later if I would make any improvements but it seems that for the power it seems that due to the voltage being higher with colder temperatures it seems that most of the time colder temperatures yielded higher power. Hi my name is Alyssa and I'm from Waipahu Intermediate School. Hi my name is Trent and I'm also from Waipahu Intermediate School. So last year my partner and I attended a presentation by NOAA the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and they talked about the growing issue of oceanic garbage patches. This project was created to decrease the amount of litter found in the world's oceans. With keeping this topic in mind our solution to this problem evolved a machine that was programmed to pick up litter on the ocean shorelines. So it has an ultrasonic sensor which works similar to a sonar and it has a scoop like attachment that would be able to hold on to the detected object. I'm Alana from Kayamiki Middle School. I'm Monica. I'm Ariel. So we chose this topic because coral since we live on an island that's surrounded by coral reefs this is relevant to us and since tourism is such a large part of the economy and part of the reason why coral reefs are dying. We found out that zinc oxide or like chemicals that are more natural based are better. But we should stop using chemical based sunscreens because that's affecting our coral reefs and how they settle. Hi my name is Katrina Kuo and this is my project. The purpose of my project is to create a device which I call the medicine is winter system also known as MDA that will be able to inform patients how much medication they consume and alert patients in case a medical overdoses and remind patients when to take their medication. I wanted to do this project because I watch news and learn that according to the National Institute of Drug Abuse 38,000 people die per year so I want to help save lives and prevent this. So I also like to program and with the codes and stuff so I put these two project ideas together to create this device. So this device will be able to calculate the number of pills left in a medicine bottle and tell their patients when to take their next medication. So there's also a countdown timer on the screen to show when it's time to take their next medication and there's two LED lights which are to show the green light is to show it is time to take their medication and the red LED light is to show it's not time to take their medication. Well I wanted to test like different light sources and see if it affects like power ring, I like power radio. So I had to build like a solar panel contraption to charge some batteries and then I would then put it inside the radio and then turn it on and then time how long it lasts. Well I found out that sunlight is still the best and nothing really can beat it. My name is Summer and I'm from Stevenson Middle School. So my project centers on the discovery of a novel solution that is a physical mode of action and combines pediculostidal and ovicidal action by using the alcohol in my solution to dissolve the cutaneous wax that surrounds the exoskeleton of the louse as well as using the PVP which is a co-polymer available in many hair care products to provide a film over the egg that prevents the nymph from hatching and restricts oxygen transfer. I'm Ren and I'm from Kameki Middle. I'm Enzo and I'm from Kameki Middle too. In Hawaii you know how the rail is being built yeah so we realize that the technology that they're using to build the rail is not necessarily the best and that there could be alternate possibilities that are better. So we researched a couple of possibilities and what we found was an idea and it was called the Hyperloop and it was created by Huan Musk the founder of Tesla the car company. So basically what it is is a maglev train which is a train that uses magnetic levitation to reduce the friction between the train and the ground and then it puts that kind of train inside a vacuum sealed chamber where there's no air so there's no air resistance there. So to propel the train actually on the bottom is all electromagnets so in the front it actually attracts the train and in the back it actually repels the train to make it move forward. I'm Lacey and I'm from the big island. My project is about hard water it's not ice it's a term used by geologists and hydrologists and it's basically the minerals passed through the water cycle that collects in the water. Through my project I did three things first I did water bottles with the same size same brand and I used soap sets so to measure the height if it's a shorter height then it's harder water. So I used 50 milliliters of water and 0.5 milliliters of soap and I shook it 20 times I had you can see here the tank water it's a shorter height in height so I measured that and it only came out to be 13 milliliters which is way shorter than the rest of the floor. Next I used champagne foods because they're glass and I used water spots which is the minerals and dirt deposits stayed behind when it dries and evaporates. So I dipped it each one in the different water resources and waited 10 to 20 minutes for it to dry and as you can see here the tank water again has more water spots than the rest and it has if you count it because it's more visible it's 63 water spots. So I'm Tracy and I'm an 8th grader at Kime County Middle School and my project's about using this coding program and plugging in an exponential equation and a logistic equation to find out a trend line and calculate its r squared. If your r squared is close to 1 in which that means that your trend line that you create is accurate if microbiologists punch in a time number in a different code the coding program will spit out a value and that value if your r squared is close to 1 will show you a value that the bacteria should grow in so in a way you can kind of predict how bacteria can grow. My name is Grace and I'm from Maipahu Intermediate. So cognition is the processes of the human brain so these can be things from reasoning to perception and learning. My project focuses on perception of information and I measure this using what is called a color shoot test. So this shoot test measures the shoot effect which is the interference time between two pieces of conflicting information. For example if you look at the color cards down here the word is shown in a color that is different from what it reads as. So my hypothesis for this experiment was that people in the quieter environments would perform 1.5 to 2 times better than the ones in the louder. And then to test this I used a vacuum cleaner as a produced sound and then I placed it at different distances from the test subject to alter the noise level. When I collected my data and did all the calculations I found that there was a difference of 1.09 between the quietest and the loudest surroundings. So my hypothesis wasn't completely supported by my data but as you can see on the graph there's still a general increase in time for them to complete the shoot test when it got louder. My name is Jordan Henry and I'm from Maipahu Intermediate. I like to drink Starbucks and tea a lot and I've been using a lot of whitening toothpaste so I decided so I wanted to see which one was actually working when I was getting them. So what I did was I used 30 eggs and I had 5 brands of whitening toothpaste which was Crest, Colgate, Armin Hammer, Sincedine and AquaFresh. I boiled the eggs and I then put the eggs into coffee because the eggshell has like similar qualities as our actual teeth since I couldn't use my own teeth. And then what I so I left that in for 24 hours and I took it out for another 24 hours and then I brushed each egg for two minutes and put it in like small up and down strokes because I saw I read that dentists say that that is the best way to brush our teeth. I then did that seven more six more times because I was representing a week of brushing. I did that for each egg and then I did that again four other times for my five trials and I found that Crest 3D White is the best toothpaste to use for whitening toothpaste because of the sodium fluoride level it has the highest out of all of them. The more sodium fluoride in the toothpaste the better the whiting toothpaste will work. Thank you very much. So our project is the optimization of algal biomass production under saltwater conditions so currently the world depends a lot on fossil fuels which is very unsustainable and it's not good for the environment so algae is argued to be one of the best alternative sources to these fossil fuels because it has a low cost production it's easy to cultivate and it can grow virtually anywhere. So a lot of companies have looked into saltwater algae but the problem with that is that many countries don't have a sustainable freshwater supply so because of that we decided to look into saltwater algae. So just to cut our hypothesis short we hypothesize that if we test different concentrations of sodium phosphate and sodium nitrate then the bottles with the 0.2 milligrams per milliliter sodium nitrate and the 0.4 milligrams per milliliter sodium phosphate will grow the most biomass. So we chose these two nutrients because there are many nutrients in the world that have different purposes in organisms but sodium phosphate and sodium nitrate are two of the most common nutrients. Sodium nitrate it's very important and chlorophyll which you know helps this photosynthesis. Sodium phosphate kind of helps plants convert nutrients into these kind of building blocks in order for it to grow. So our procedure is that first we want to kind of optimize the environment so we build a photo by reactor system with metal racks so we had an oxygen tank and we had an air generator and we had those like two things that carry those airs as well as light, aquarium lights to each of the algae bottles. So the reason why we decided to work with saltwater algae is because you know we're in Hawaii and we're basically surrounded by saltwater so like if companies want to use our research to like build their or expand their algae production enterprises here, saltwater is really easily accessible so over a two-weeks period we grow those algae in our photo by reactor system and we took it to our high school lab to analyze it for dry biomass content. So what we did is that we had it centrifuged, we used a drying oven to get the liquid out. I'm Annie Nakamoto and I'm from Waiakea High School. So I'm studying how the rapid ohia death disease affects the photosynthetic capabilities of the ohia tree and I'm doing this because the ohia tree is a very important part of Hawaii's ecosystem. It makes up 62% of our overall forest area and native species rely on it for habitat and it also protects our watershed so I wanted to see how the disease would impact our Hawaii's ecosystem as a whole. Carbon capture, I wanted to focus on that because I wanted to relate my project to climate change. We also talked with some of the teachers behind the kids and some of the members of the Hawaii Academy of Science which runs the fair and some of the dedicated judges who take the time to judge and critique their projects. Why do we care about the Hawaii science fair? Not only for these kids who are amazing and win awards and get scholarships but for all the kids and families who are inspired to learn engage and participate in science. They came from schools from around the island in the state they came with their parents teachers mentors and friends it was a celebration for kids for science and for Hawaii. Some will have one trips to compete on the mainland some will be national winners some will get life changing scholarships and be catapulted into fabulous careers but every kid there is a winner. The fair enhances the way they think and present themselves and that in turn builds lifelong confidence and quality of life. There are other winners too they include the parents teachers mentors and friends and the judges members and officials of the fair itself and for that matter all the people who came to the fair to join the celebration. We want Hawaii to be steeped in science and technology. We want every kid and parent to speak the language of science. We want them to be at the frontiers of science and participate in the mind boggling miracles being discovered. To do that we need to start treating these kids and the development of our science and tech sector as a top priority and to make generous investments in them. We need to assemble a critical mass of our most promising resources the techies the makers the startups the entrepreneurs and especially these science kids and get them to do something big. What is that something? It's nothing less than to reshape our economy and save our state. To build a world-class workforce one that will spawn great local careers and companies to go beyond the limitations of our one-dimensional tourism economy and find a sustainable niche among the challenges of the 21st century. If we don't keep up with the world today we and our kids will fall behind possibly forever. Some say this is already happening so it's not a time to be complacent but keeping up takes commitment not by a few but by everyone you know. If we can build a generation of kids like these kids at the fair yes then maybe we can do it. So that's why the fair is so important. It's a statement of their future and ours. If your kid hasn't participated in the fair make next year priority and if you didn't go this year go next year to show your support. Let's make the fair part of the life plan of every kid. Let's fill the hall and their curious minds with science. A few years ago in fiscal hard times the legislature stopped funding the fair. Since then the fair has worked hard to find new funding and things are presumably better for them now. If you get a chance to help the fair personally or through your public officials please do. It's for a good cause maybe the best cause of all. Want to know more about the Hawaii State Science and Engineering Fair or the Hawaii Academy of Science? Check them out at Hawaiiacademyofscience.org slash science-fair. And now let's take a look at our Think Tech calendar of events going forward. There's so much happening in Hawaii sometimes things happen under the radar and we don't hear much about them but Think Tech will take you there. Remember you can watch Think Tech on OC16 several times every week to stay current on what's happening in government, industry, academia and communities around the islands and the world. Think Tech broadcasts daily talk shows live on the internet from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays then we broadcast our earlier shows all night long and on the weekends. If you missed a show or if you want to replay or share our shows they're all archived on demand on ThinkTechHawaii.com and YouTube. The audio is on ThinkTechHawaii.com slash radio and we post all our shows as podcasts on iTunes. See our website for links. Visit ThinkTechHawaii.com for our weekly calendar and live streaming YouTube links or sign up on our email list and get the daily docket of our upcoming shows. ThinkTech has a high tech green screen first amendment studio at Pioneer Plaza. 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For lots more ThinkTech videos and for underwriting and sponsorship opportunities on ThinkTech visit ThinkTechHawaii.com be a guest or a host a producer or an intern and help us reach and have an impact on Hawaii. Thanks for being part of our ThinkTech family and for supporting our open discussion of tech, energy, diversification and global awareness in Hawaii and of course science as a central theme in all of that. You can watch this show throughout the week and tune in next Sunday evening for our next important weekly episode. I'm Raya Salter and I'm Elise Anderson. Aloha everyone.