At the age of 13, Kelvin Doe of Sierra Leone started making batteries and generators using only scrap materials gathered in and around his home. He’s a completely self-taught engineer who manages his own fully-staffed community radio station in Sierra Leone where he broadcasts news and plays music under the moniker ‘DJ Focus.’ This radio station is powered by a generator created from a deteriorating voltage stabilizer, which he found in the trash, while a simple antenna lets his neighborhood listen in. Continue reading for more.
5. EZ Baby Saver
Andrew Schuler may only be 12-years-old, but he’s been inventing things for years. Last year, he entered a rubber band youth inventors contest. It all started when he read an article about a woman in his neighborhood who had left her child in a car and the rest is history. According to Schuler, “You take the EZ Baby Saver and, as your getting in your car seat, you attach it to the door handle like so. When you’re getting out of the car you see oh you know this bright flashing rubber band you’re like oh you know my child is still in the car.”
4. Hiccupops
We all get hiccups from time to time, and the biggest problem is trying to get rid of them. But then 13-year-old Mallory Kievman might have finally found a cure to this irritating problem: the Hiccupop. She created the hiccup-stopper right in her family’s kitchen, in Manchester, Connecticut, using lollipops, apple cider vinegar and sugar. “It triggers a set of nerves in your throat and mouth that are responsible for the hiccup reflex arc. It basically over-stimulates those nerves and cancels out the message to hiccup,” the 13-year-old says.
3. Body Heat Powered Flashlight
Ann Makosinski, a 15-year-old girl from Canada, has invented a flashlight that produces a usable amount of light just by using the heat from your hand. In other words, a small amount of electricity can be harvested as electrons flow between the cool and hot sides of a material. The light generated is modest, but enough to find your keys or light the page of a book. At an ambient temperature of about 50°F, it worked for around half an hour in her tests, but would last longer or shorter depending on temperature differences.
2. The Ocean Cleanup
Nineteen-year-old Boyan Slat has unveiled an innovative Ocean Cleanup Array that could remove 7.25-million tons of plastic waste from the world’s oceans. The system consists of an anchored network of floating booms and processing platforms that could be places in garbage patches around the world. This array would cover the entire garbage patch, acting as a giant funnel and forcing plastic in the direction of the platforms, where it would be separated from plankton, filtered and stored for recycling.
1. One Minute Mobile Phone Charger
Eesha Khare, a 19-year-old student at Harvard, made a technological discovery that has the potential to change the future of how you use your cell phone. According to HuffPost, a “supercapacitor acts as an energy storage device that holds a great amount energy in a small amount of space. Not only is the device convenient because it’s speedy, but the device is also portable because of its small size. Eesha says it can fit inside of cell phones and other electronic devices, meaning people will not need to rely on electric outlets as often.”
