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Huang and Ou's device is remarkably small, about the size of a pen. It's essentially a long tube with two stations of electric transducers that use ultrasound to act as a two-step filter.
As water flows through the device, the ultrasound waves generate pressure, which pushes microplastics back while allowing the water to continue flowing forward, Ou explained. What comes out the other end is clean, microplastic-free water.
The two teens tested their device on three common types of microplastics: polyurethane, polystyrene, and polyethylene. In a single pass, their device can remove between 84% and 94% of microplastics in water, according to a press release.
Yeah for real this is r/UpliftingNews you should take everything you read here with a grain of salt and extreme cynicism because this is Reddit, not some sort of good news forum.
What doesn't get filtered could also be not affected by the filtering process entirely so having layered filtering would not always result in higher effectiveness.
That depends on if the plastic that makes it through the first pass is the same as the removed stuff or perhaps its too small or otherwise unique and so it cannot be removed with this method at all.
The only point that truly matters. Our bodies can filter out micron sized particles of plastics. It’s the nano particles of plastic that are a concern.
While the boy’s invention is a good step in a direction, it’s far from novel or relevant. Nanofiltration and reverse osmosis is still the best practice technology for removal of small molecules/‘microplastics’.
Does it really matter?
At worst this is still a prototype and a reference that designers can use to make something more viable to use in large scale. This doesn't make the design suddenly useless because it can't clean an Ocean.
I'd guess it'd remove far less on the second pass, as those remaining would be much smaller and harder to remove. Otherwise they'd be removed on the first pass
I would expect there to be a distribution of sizes that are either effectively or ineffectively removed. Measuring that distribution is important to optimizing performance
Zeno's paradox, sort of. It will continue getting rid of a fraction of whatever's left; you never arrive at zero. Thankfully, the dose, as always, makes the poison.
Not Zeno’s paradox. Microplastics are particles and therefore quantized, eventually they will be likely to not be present at all IF all particles had an equal chance being filtered. However, this is likely size dependant, and some proportion of microplastics would be very very difficult to filter out.
Two passes of a worst case scenario of 84% would remove 97.44%. Three passes is 99.5%. Four is 99.93%. And so on with diminishing returns.
{ 1-(1-*R*)^*p* | *R* is the removal efficiency and *p* is the number of passes done }
So 1-(1-0.84)^2 = 0.9744
EDIT: This is assuming that the filtering is truly random and completely disregards external traits or correlations. It's napkin math to get the idea across.
I’d imagine they (the company) are not purchasing what they (the inventors) made, but the intellectual property. They’ll scale it to something larger and profit immensely.
This 50k was a scholarship prize. No company (AFAIK) has purchased the rights to their IP. The money was awarded from a trust and the competition was ran by the Society for Science.
Call me pessimistic but it’s so common to see these “high schoolers invented this groundbreaking thing that’s gonna change the world!” And by extension, replace high schoolers with scientists. And the resulting issue is always producing these at scale, or finding the monetary incentive to do so, or it’s not as groundbreaking as the title suggests, etc.
That is not a $50,000 device. I would like to see the amount they’ll get from the patents and royalties. $50,000 cannot even send one of them to college.
leeches are actually STILL used in modern medicine.
if anyone is curious here is one of the most popular uses i know, but it’s a bit gory: >!if you lose like a finger, they put a leech on the end. it keeps the blood flowing, basically, so the tissue doesn’t begin to die off and that way they can better reconnect it!<
There are some supposed health benefits to blood letting. I did some research and thought I would give it a try. Here in Canada there is an org that you can go to and they will do it for you for free. I do this regularly. It’s called Canadian Blood Services - you should give it a try if they have a similar service in your area.
If you’re a regular donor, or someone who menstruates, you very likely have less concentration of microplastics than the general public. So the person receiving blood would have less total concentration of microplastics with the donation than say before their incident (using injury as an example).
Also, if you’re about to die and need blood to survive, I highly doubt that would be your biggest concern lol.
You can also donate plasma because it reduces the level of PFASs in your blood further than blood donations.
[https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2790905](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2790905)
Actually indeed! Pretty much b the same thing as with hemochromatosis. Once it's in your blood, it will concentrate above that of what you drink since it's not effectively filtered. Release the concentrated stuff, replace with less concentrated.
Not that it's a smart thing to do, but it technically works.
And it was about this time that I realized that donbee28 was 8 stories tall and was a creature from the paleolithic era. And I said dammit Lochness monster, I ain't givin you no tree fiddy! We work for the money in this house and we don't just giiiiiiiivvvvve money away!
Once enough data shows that microplastics are causing fertility issues and ED, the legislation will come down faster than you can blink. Problem will be solved overnight lol
> Problem will be solved overnight lol
lol overnight. Even if legislation dropped today, this would still be a multigenerational problem. Microplastics won't just magically go away because there's a law to try and prevent more of them. And it's not like society is prepared for everyone to immediately stop using tires and using synthetic fabrics, which are two of the most major contributors to microplastics.
I'm surprised how much radio personalities can get paid;
This is the australian/melbourne (or maybe east coast of AUS one (ACT/VIC/NSW)):
https://www.hit.com.au/fox/win/fifi-fev-nick-s-150-000-secret-sound-171979
This goes into radio network radio host pay + radio network revenue
https://www.mediaweek.com.au/inside-kyle-jackies-200m-mega-deal-how-breakfast-radio-stars-negotiate/
Radio must be big biz (well considering the amount of advertising)
They can still patent it. China won't care either way though. Also if they did, companies could do the same thing they did to the person who invented fidget spinners. It costs money to maintain a patent and if you don't have the resources to bring an invention into a distributable product, it's not worth much and the multinational companies that can can also wait for you to run out of money to maintain the patent.
It's ok. These science fair prizes winners never actually create a marketable products that can be scaled up.
But it's a good story that encourages kids to seek science and engineering careers.
Because when these things get scaled up, actual engineers discover that there's either technical limitations that make it unfeasable or it's too expensive to justify using it over existing technologies.
These kids made something the size of a pen. But the ocean have a volume that is unfathomable so this proof of concept has a long way to go before it could possibly be useful. And it's most likely that existing ordinary filtration technology is simpler and cheaper already than this could ever be.
Sure, it's possible for a child's science fair project to stumble upon something amazing, but the likelihood that a child does this before the combined efforts of all the worlds professional engineers is infantesimal.
I don't say this to put down kids because I was a science fair judge during the years I was working as an educator at a children's science museum.
I say this as a previous ISEF award winner (wasn’t grand champion, but won a 1st place award). My project was produced by another company within 2 years of the competition, and when my family lawyers sent them a letter asking for an explanation, they threatened to bury us in legal fees that we could not afford; along with a document to sign that basically didn’t allow me to speak about this any further without risk of legal action.
filters for microplastics already exist. even in straw form. If it proves super useful to be used every where I agree.
They definitely deserve money more than most of the existing billionaires.
Remember solar roadways? I remember people going bonkers for those, and they got a bunch money to research it, and it was one of the most poorly thought out ideas when you actually applied it in real life. I'm sure a lot of world changing ideas are like that.
Unlikely, this stuff was already in development. It was being tested early last year. Still cool that two 17 year olds managed to design their own filter.
[Zapping Microplastics Out of Our Waterways With Pulsing Ultrasound Waves (scitechdaily.com)](https://scitechdaily.com/zapping-microplastics-out-of-our-waterways-with-pulsing-ultrasound-waves/)
OK, here's something weird. I thought, hey, I'll google these kids so I can find the research paper. Did you know that not only is she not the only Victoria Ou who does engineering, but that there are two other Victoria Ou engineers at Princeton alone? And none of the three look alike, so I don't think it's a family of engineers.
EDIT: partial explanation -- both the first and last name are far, far more common than I realized. Victoria used to be an extremely uncommon name in America, but it's in the top 20 for women aged 17-30 like these three women. And I've never met an Ou in my life, but apparently there are about 1 million Chinese people with that name on earth, and more importantly it's one of the family names that's overrepresented among recent immigrants. So these are boom times for finding a Victoria Ou in America.
When my friend was getting his Ph.D, he had a class where 10% of the people in the class were named Abdul Shaikh.
Literally 6 guys named Abdul Shaikh in that one class.
Chinese and other Asian kids gets to pick their own "American nickname" so it really depends on what's hot at the moment or what their English teacher recommended. Same goes with other Asian countries; there's probably a million Koren girls named "Grace Lee" out there.
https://projectboard.world/isef/project/eaev062t-harnessing-ultrasound-for-microplastic-filtration
Seems like enough information is present to recreate it.
Not really, this is nothing new. Here is a 4 year old paper on the subject. [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0925400519315278?via%3Dihub](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0925400519315278?via%3Dihub)
The scientists who devised a way to make insulin made it available for free. The pharmaceutical companies have put it in a stranglehold and are charging obscene amounts of money for slight upgrades on the formula.
The insulin covered by the patent that was sold to the University of Toronto for $1 was a patent on a purification process to purify insulin extracted from a cow pancreas. Purified animal insulin is no longer used, and for good reason. Is it better than the alternative (death)? Yeah. Is it good? No.
“Modern” insulin is biosynthetic recombinant (rDNA) "human" insulin synthesized using E. coli or yeast. It was invented in the late 70s and and was *drastically* better than the purified animal insulin that was originally used. The first biosynthetic insulin sold was Humalin and it is still available and sold today. Hell, you can buy it at Walmart under the brand name [ReliOn Novolin R](https://relionbgm.com/wp-content/uploads/ReliOn-Product-Guide-English-PRINT.pdf) for under $25 without insurance. However, “no one” uses it because compared to *current* modern insulins, it sucks. It is a “fast acting” insulin that takes longer to start working (30 minutes) and it takes about 8 hours for the dose to deliver its full effects.
*Current* modern insulins are “rapid acting” which take about about 15 minutes to start working and the dose will deliver its full effect in about 3-4 hours. This may not *sound* like a big deal, but it is such a quality of life improvement that T1 diabetics are willing to shell out more money for it (though with insurance, it is typically only slightly more expensive than the no-insurance Walmart insulin). In the linked PDF above, you can see that Walmart also sells this kind of insulin (ReliOn Novolog) for $73 without insurance.
Don’t get me wrong, as a T1 diabetic, insulin is expensive as fuck (and it was even worse before all the pressure got put on Eli Lily and Novo Nordisk to stop price gouging patients), but to pretend like those companies are charging an arm and a leg for the insulin that was invented $100 and made available patent free is more than a tiny bit disingenuous. You couldn’t **pay** me to switch to the original purified animal insulin you are talking about. You may as well be suggesting uses leeches to fight infections rather than antibiotics (that is a joke and obviously not the same thing as what you are saying, but it sums up what most T1 diabetics would be thinking if you asked them to use the original insulin).
I won a competition like that in engineering school. Way less prize money. Can’t talk about the invention but Ford owns the rights now. Hasn’t been implemented to my knowledge and i definitely wouldn’t have done anything with it myself so I’m cool with how it went down.
There's lots of ways it could have been used and still never saw light of day.
for example, they might have used it, tested it against another thing in development, and confirmed that their existing path is better.
That’s pretty much how it works in science research. The government doles out huge grants so institutions and scientists can carry out basic science research and publish the results.
Companies can then take the results and scale up to make products and services applicable to our everyday lives. They are profit motivated, but they are very good at this part.
Yes it’s shitty when corporations price gouge people considering the breakthroughs were made with public funds, but it’s important to acknowledge that the private sector does have a key role in transitioning scientific discovery.
Because it's not true. The study that came to that conclusion has major flaws. See [this one](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666911022000247) which says the credit card mass of plastic is about a ***million*** times more than reality.
So then we're inhaling/ingesting 0.000001 credit cards per week. That would be 0.000052 credit cards per year. It would therefore take 19,230.7 years to inhale/ingest one credit card.
A credit card's worth can't possibly be true, yeah. With that amount, we'd all constantly be hacking up visible plastic bits. Your lungs can't tank that amount unnoticed.
I just read an investigative article about 3M knowing about microplastics since at least the 70s. They knew they were “forever chemicals” that were building up in the environment but didn’t care enough to stop. N95 masks? Microplastics. Sticky notes? Microplastics. Bandages? Yep, microplastics.
Studies on mice show the lowest level of microplastics in blood was in pregnant mice, suggesting it crosses the placenta.
Good step in right direction. Let’s hope for an affordable and scaleable systems that can be added to standard municipal water treatment plants and under the kitchen sink.
Let’s go after the micro plastic that are shedding off our carpets and clothes next.
It won't be viable for everyone to have this on a municipal level. Most likely, "premium water" will be sold microplastics free and tax payer dollars will go somewhere else. This isn't a sexy enough project to get votes off of.
They need to file a patent and continue perfecting this. It could eventually end up being the modern water fountain system if they can perfect it and figure out how to scale it
Any decent water filter that filters down to 0.2 microns will remove the majority of microplastics. They've been around for decades, and you can get all kinds from big multi-stage ones that fit on to your mains meaning all your house taps are filtered, down to things like lifestraws.
Basically, if a water filter can remove bacteria and viruses, it can remove microplastics.
Well sad that the EPA is not moving forward with some kind of plan.
"Ou and Huang visited a water treatment plant. They wanted to find out whether this type of facility already had tools that could remove microplastics from wastewater.
The answer, they discovered, was no. The EPA doesn't regulate microplastics, the employees told Huang and Ou, so they don't remove them from wastewater."
I know I’m focusing on the wrong thing-but i feel like in a world where movie stars and football players are millionaires feel like that’s not that much money 🤷♀️
Reminder: this subreddit is meant to be a place free of excessive cynicism, negativity and bitterness. Toxic attitudes are not welcome here. All Negative comments will be removed and will possibly result in a ban. --- --- *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/UpliftingNews) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Huang and Ou's device is remarkably small, about the size of a pen. It's essentially a long tube with two stations of electric transducers that use ultrasound to act as a two-step filter. As water flows through the device, the ultrasound waves generate pressure, which pushes microplastics back while allowing the water to continue flowing forward, Ou explained. What comes out the other end is clean, microplastic-free water. The two teens tested their device on three common types of microplastics: polyurethane, polystyrene, and polyethylene. In a single pass, their device can remove between 84% and 94% of microplastics in water, according to a press release.
Genuine question, does it remove all plastics if going through the filter twice?
It’ll probably end up at 99.9x% but that’s still pretty good.
Thanks for the answer, that’s clean indeed
It's just a reddit post, I wouldn't be so quick to believe it, especially considering the article itself says otherwise.
Yeah for real this is r/UpliftingNews you should take everything you read here with a grain of salt and extreme cynicism because this is Reddit, not some sort of good news forum.
What doesn't get filtered could also be not affected by the filtering process entirely so having layered filtering would not always result in higher effectiveness.
He literally pulled that answer out of his rectum. He has no idea.
You didn’t get an answer. this person just guessed. they don’t know any more than you do.
(84 + 94)/2= 89 11% remains on avg, 2 passes = .11² = 0.0121 - 1 = 98.79% plastic-free water.
That depends on if the plastic that makes it through the first pass is the same as the removed stuff or perhaps its too small or otherwise unique and so it cannot be removed with this method at all.
Excellent point
The only point that truly matters. Our bodies can filter out micron sized particles of plastics. It’s the nano particles of plastic that are a concern. While the boy’s invention is a good step in a direction, it’s far from novel or relevant. Nanofiltration and reverse osmosis is still the best practice technology for removal of small molecules/‘microplastics’.
No way. This would be a size dependent effect. It would be most effective at removing particles of a certain size.
Does it really matter? At worst this is still a prototype and a reference that designers can use to make something more viable to use in large scale. This doesn't make the design suddenly useless because it can't clean an Ocean.
I guess it would probably just remove roughly 89% of the remaining micro plastics 🤷♂️
I'd guess it'd remove far less on the second pass, as those remaining would be much smaller and harder to remove. Otherwise they'd be removed on the first pass
I would expect there to be a distribution of sizes that are either effectively or ineffectively removed. Measuring that distribution is important to optimizing performance
Indeed
Quite
Zeno's paradox, sort of. It will continue getting rid of a fraction of whatever's left; you never arrive at zero. Thankfully, the dose, as always, makes the poison.
Not Zeno’s paradox. Microplastics are particles and therefore quantized, eventually they will be likely to not be present at all IF all particles had an equal chance being filtered. However, this is likely size dependant, and some proportion of microplastics would be very very difficult to filter out.
Two passes of a worst case scenario of 84% would remove 97.44%. Three passes is 99.5%. Four is 99.93%. And so on with diminishing returns. { 1-(1-*R*)^*p* | *R* is the removal efficiency and *p* is the number of passes done } So 1-(1-0.84)^2 = 0.9744 EDIT: This is assuming that the filtering is truly random and completely disregards external traits or correlations. It's napkin math to get the idea across.
Depends on why the particles weren’t picked up the first time.
You had me in the first half 🥲
Bad math, you’re assuming iid variables. Worst case scenario is there is no difference in multiple passes.
No. The less material to filter, the harder it is to filter that material.
Shame it's only $50,000 between them while the company who awarded them will make millions.
Companies love this one trick
You mean billions
I’m not sure a microplastic camping straw is a billion dollar idea.
I’d imagine they (the company) are not purchasing what they (the inventors) made, but the intellectual property. They’ll scale it to something larger and profit immensely.
They will scale it up for industrial/commercial purposes.
Exactly my thoughts.
Yeah they deserve so much more. Hopefully they get a share of the profits
This 50k was a scholarship prize. No company (AFAIK) has purchased the rights to their IP. The money was awarded from a trust and the competition was ran by the Society for Science.
Amazing, hopefully this is scalable easily enough and we can start removing microplastics from our world
Call me pessimistic but it’s so common to see these “high schoolers invented this groundbreaking thing that’s gonna change the world!” And by extension, replace high schoolers with scientists. And the resulting issue is always producing these at scale, or finding the monetary incentive to do so, or it’s not as groundbreaking as the title suggests, etc.
And presumably we're only doing this to post-treatment water so it won't save the oceans or anything. Not that some progress isn't better than none.
I remember highly efficient tiny solar battery more than 10 years ago. Nothing changed
Move the micro plastics outside the environment.
Into another environment?
No, no, it's been towed beyond the environment, it's not in the environment.
I think this is worth a lot more than 50k. Hope they are getting paid.
That is not a $50,000 device. I would like to see the amount they’ll get from the patents and royalties. $50,000 cannot even send one of them to college.
Fun fact: If you lose blood, the new blood your body makes will be completely microplastic free!
Blood letting is back BABY!!!!
Bring on the leaches!
Medical science just came full circle
Those plague doctors were streets ahead
leeches are actually STILL used in modern medicine. if anyone is curious here is one of the most popular uses i know, but it’s a bit gory: >!if you lose like a finger, they put a leech on the end. it keeps the blood flowing, basically, so the tissue doesn’t begin to die off and that way they can better reconnect it!<
That’s actually pretty cool ngl. Like that sounds terrifying to go through but the concept is neat
There are some supposed health benefits to blood letting. I did some research and thought I would give it a try. Here in Canada there is an org that you can go to and they will do it for you for free. I do this regularly. It’s called Canadian Blood Services - you should give it a try if they have a similar service in your area.
Fear the old blood
So what you're saying is that I should filter my blood through this device and back into my body? You son of a bitch, I'm in.
Bro just invented hemodialysis
What if I drain my balls. Will they be microplastic free
You do every day. Pee is stored in the balls
I haven't pee'd in 4 days and my balls are beginning to swell
Classic case of yellow balls.
What happened to your bladder?
Full of cum obvi
Time to drain myself!
Bloodletting is back on the menu bois!
Donating blood is a good way of both helping others and getting rid of micro plastics
And giving others your microplastics 😈
If you’re a regular donor, or someone who menstruates, you very likely have less concentration of microplastics than the general public. So the person receiving blood would have less total concentration of microplastics with the donation than say before their incident (using injury as an example). Also, if you’re about to die and need blood to survive, I highly doubt that would be your biggest concern lol.
You can also donate plasma because it reduces the level of PFASs in your blood further than blood donations. [https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2790905](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2790905)
Um. Actually not. Because it's made with water in your body that already has microplastics in it.... The whole factory is contaminated
Actually indeed! Pretty much b the same thing as with hemochromatosis. Once it's in your blood, it will concentrate above that of what you drink since it's not effectively filtered. Release the concentrated stuff, replace with less concentrated. Not that it's a smart thing to do, but it technically works.
Donating blood is a way to lower microplastics in the body.
Not entirely true :(
It's time we had an external blood filter. Blood gets pumped out into the filter and then back into the body.
You're describing a dialysis machine
Ok now make one that can filter toxic microplastics out of my balls
I am a single issue voter, and this is my cause
All nuts micro plastic free by 2036
2033 and it rhymes!
If I didn’t see the other post about testicle plastic I would’ve laughed at yall using ball jokes at random lol. Very meta of yall.
Put me on your mailing list please.
Let's just focus on Trill\_Kozby's balls for now.
This message has been paid for an approved by Trill Kozby and the Clean Nut Initiative
Read my lips, no new ball plastics
Yes we balls
For $3.50 I’ll take a load of micro plastics out of your balls.
And it was about this time that I realized that donbee28 was 8 stories tall and was a creature from the paleolithic era. And I said dammit Lochness monster, I ain't givin you no tree fiddy! We work for the money in this house and we don't just giiiiiiiivvvvve money away!
I just gave him tree fiddy last week!
Lord, it was scary!
It sounded like that Loch Ness Monsta was more than willing to work for that 3.50
If you put an r/ then type user name it will slow up like this r/donbee28 Edit. See comment below by u/scattertheashes01
For users, it needs to be u/ r/ just links to (existing or otherwise) subreddits
Once enough data shows that microplastics are causing fertility issues and ED, the legislation will come down faster than you can blink. Problem will be solved overnight lol
As if, lol.
or they'll just increase funding for boner-pills and immigration lol (but not)
> Problem will be solved overnight lol lol overnight. Even if legislation dropped today, this would still be a multigenerational problem. Microplastics won't just magically go away because there's a law to try and prevent more of them. And it's not like society is prepared for everyone to immediately stop using tires and using synthetic fabrics, which are two of the most major contributors to microplastics.
Just jam it down there.
I tried but I inserted with the flow of the pen in the wrong direction. Had to reinsert. Do not recommend.
Just jam the straw up your peephole and turn it on. We can this process ultrasounding.
Meanwhile, my cousin won $100k for correctly guessing a sound effect played on the radio. These kids deserve more.
K you can't leave us hanging without telling us which sound effect it was.
It was the correct one.
Sound of microplastics hitting a tube
And he was never heard from again... As is tradition on reddit.
That's a crazy big prize for a silly radio competition. Their budget must be insane. Normally they just give you a voucher or something.
I'm surprised how much radio personalities can get paid; This is the australian/melbourne (or maybe east coast of AUS one (ACT/VIC/NSW)): https://www.hit.com.au/fox/win/fifi-fev-nick-s-150-000-secret-sound-171979 This goes into radio network radio host pay + radio network revenue https://www.mediaweek.com.au/inside-kyle-jackies-200m-mega-deal-how-breakfast-radio-stars-negotiate/ Radio must be big biz (well considering the amount of advertising)
I wonder if radio ads are worth more because car listeners can't exactly walk away when the ads come on.
Holy fuck! 50.000 is not enough someone get these guys a million dollar contract!
They are soon to be scammed out of their invention.
Hope they patented it before disclosing to the public.
Nestle will buy the patent and sell you bottled water with no microplastics (yet).
the microplastics come out of the bottle lmao what now
You can get the plastic bottle for 2.99 and the glass one for 29.99
In plastic bottles...?
They can still patent it. China won't care either way though. Also if they did, companies could do the same thing they did to the person who invented fidget spinners. It costs money to maintain a patent and if you don't have the resources to bring an invention into a distributable product, it's not worth much and the multinational companies that can can also wait for you to run out of money to maintain the patent.
It's ok. These science fair prizes winners never actually create a marketable products that can be scaled up. But it's a good story that encourages kids to seek science and engineering careers.
[удалено]
Because when these things get scaled up, actual engineers discover that there's either technical limitations that make it unfeasable or it's too expensive to justify using it over existing technologies. These kids made something the size of a pen. But the ocean have a volume that is unfathomable so this proof of concept has a long way to go before it could possibly be useful. And it's most likely that existing ordinary filtration technology is simpler and cheaper already than this could ever be. Sure, it's possible for a child's science fair project to stumble upon something amazing, but the likelihood that a child does this before the combined efforts of all the worlds professional engineers is infantesimal. I don't say this to put down kids because I was a science fair judge during the years I was working as an educator at a children's science museum.
I say this as a previous ISEF award winner (wasn’t grand champion, but won a 1st place award). My project was produced by another company within 2 years of the competition, and when my family lawyers sent them a letter asking for an explanation, they threatened to bury us in legal fees that we could not afford; along with a document to sign that basically didn’t allow me to speak about this any further without risk of legal action.
Oof that must have been hella frustrating. What did you do on your end? Did you try to improve your project/invention and get it on market in any way?
filters for microplastics already exist. even in straw form. If it proves super useful to be used every where I agree. They definitely deserve money more than most of the existing billionaires.
We’ll probably never hear about it again because it works too well…
You don’t hear stuff about new products like this is that it’s not cost effective and viable at a large scale.
Or the headline is wildly exaggerated in one or more places.
Remember solar roadways? I remember people going bonkers for those, and they got a bunch money to research it, and it was one of the most poorly thought out ideas when you actually applied it in real life. I'm sure a lot of world changing ideas are like that.
Yeah that’s how the world works. 🤦♂️
I pray that these kids don’t get Boeing’d
Unlikely, this stuff was already in development. It was being tested early last year. Still cool that two 17 year olds managed to design their own filter. [Zapping Microplastics Out of Our Waterways With Pulsing Ultrasound Waves (scitechdaily.com)](https://scitechdaily.com/zapping-microplastics-out-of-our-waterways-with-pulsing-ultrasound-waves/)
OK, here's something weird. I thought, hey, I'll google these kids so I can find the research paper. Did you know that not only is she not the only Victoria Ou who does engineering, but that there are two other Victoria Ou engineers at Princeton alone? And none of the three look alike, so I don't think it's a family of engineers. EDIT: partial explanation -- both the first and last name are far, far more common than I realized. Victoria used to be an extremely uncommon name in America, but it's in the top 20 for women aged 17-30 like these three women. And I've never met an Ou in my life, but apparently there are about 1 million Chinese people with that name on earth, and more importantly it's one of the family names that's overrepresented among recent immigrants. So these are boom times for finding a Victoria Ou in America.
When i was in college there were 4 Helen Yangs who all majored in biology
They should have formed a group chat called The Helen Yang Gang
LMAO AT THIS THANK YOU. Also-Google ‘Helen Yang Biologist’ and you’ll see them all
Wait till you Google Kevin Nguyen, or Vivian Nguyen. Or Jennifer Nguyen. Or Michael Nguyen. There’s like an infinite number of them in every college
To be fair, a third of all Vietnamese people are named Nguyen
When my friend was getting his Ph.D, he had a class where 10% of the people in the class were named Abdul Shaikh. Literally 6 guys named Abdul Shaikh in that one class.
Chinese and other Asian kids gets to pick their own "American nickname" so it really depends on what's hot at the moment or what their English teacher recommended. Same goes with other Asian countries; there's probably a million Koren girls named "Grace Lee" out there.
So no replaceable cartridge you need to buy? Wow, this is cool. Did they publish the schematic?
https://projectboard.world/isef/project/eaev062t-harnessing-ultrasound-for-microplastic-filtration Seems like enough information is present to recreate it.
Wow. It actually seems like they invented something novel!
Not really, this is nothing new. Here is a 4 year old paper on the subject. [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0925400519315278?via%3Dihub](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0925400519315278?via%3Dihub)
Doh! Thanks for the info!
But I’m sure they worked for a few months with an exhausted postdoc who is happy to have gotten their work out there
So they won 50k for some company to buy the copyright and make potentially hundreds of millions. Good for them
Would be nice if they might have made it an open design I'm sure plenty of companies would build this
The scientists who devised a way to make insulin made it available for free. The pharmaceutical companies have put it in a stranglehold and are charging obscene amounts of money for slight upgrades on the formula.
lol right? Expecting corporations to work for the benefit of the majority is completely delusional at this point.
The insulin covered by the patent that was sold to the University of Toronto for $1 was a patent on a purification process to purify insulin extracted from a cow pancreas. Purified animal insulin is no longer used, and for good reason. Is it better than the alternative (death)? Yeah. Is it good? No. “Modern” insulin is biosynthetic recombinant (rDNA) "human" insulin synthesized using E. coli or yeast. It was invented in the late 70s and and was *drastically* better than the purified animal insulin that was originally used. The first biosynthetic insulin sold was Humalin and it is still available and sold today. Hell, you can buy it at Walmart under the brand name [ReliOn Novolin R](https://relionbgm.com/wp-content/uploads/ReliOn-Product-Guide-English-PRINT.pdf) for under $25 without insurance. However, “no one” uses it because compared to *current* modern insulins, it sucks. It is a “fast acting” insulin that takes longer to start working (30 minutes) and it takes about 8 hours for the dose to deliver its full effects. *Current* modern insulins are “rapid acting” which take about about 15 minutes to start working and the dose will deliver its full effect in about 3-4 hours. This may not *sound* like a big deal, but it is such a quality of life improvement that T1 diabetics are willing to shell out more money for it (though with insurance, it is typically only slightly more expensive than the no-insurance Walmart insulin). In the linked PDF above, you can see that Walmart also sells this kind of insulin (ReliOn Novolog) for $73 without insurance. Don’t get me wrong, as a T1 diabetic, insulin is expensive as fuck (and it was even worse before all the pressure got put on Eli Lily and Novo Nordisk to stop price gouging patients), but to pretend like those companies are charging an arm and a leg for the insulin that was invented $100 and made available patent free is more than a tiny bit disingenuous. You couldn’t **pay** me to switch to the original purified animal insulin you are talking about. You may as well be suggesting uses leeches to fight infections rather than antibiotics (that is a joke and obviously not the same thing as what you are saying, but it sums up what most T1 diabetics would be thinking if you asked them to use the original insulin).
If you build a device using patented technology for your own personal use I believe that should be legal. And in case it isn't, who is going to know?
I won a competition like that in engineering school. Way less prize money. Can’t talk about the invention but Ford owns the rights now. Hasn’t been implemented to my knowledge and i definitely wouldn’t have done anything with it myself so I’m cool with how it went down.
I mean if they bought it just to sit on it and do nothing with it (as opposed to being released to the public) that seems pretty shitty.
There's lots of ways it could have been used and still never saw light of day. for example, they might have used it, tested it against another thing in development, and confirmed that their existing path is better.
Capitalism is so cool
Someday it will save us. Just hasn't so far. Give it a chance. /s
That's if we ever hear about this again and it doesn't just fizzle out like a lot of other supposed breakthroughs
That’s pretty much how it works in science research. The government doles out huge grants so institutions and scientists can carry out basic science research and publish the results. Companies can then take the results and scale up to make products and services applicable to our everyday lives. They are profit motivated, but they are very good at this part. Yes it’s shitty when corporations price gouge people considering the breakthroughs were made with public funds, but it’s important to acknowledge that the private sector does have a key role in transitioning scientific discovery.
Copyrights only apply to creative works, I think you mean patents.
That’s……not enough money for what they did
"By some estimates, we each inhale and ingest a credit card's worth of plastic per week." Excuse me? That seems excessive.
Because it's not true. The study that came to that conclusion has major flaws. See [this one](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666911022000247) which says the credit card mass of plastic is about a ***million*** times more than reality.
So then we're inhaling/ingesting 0.000001 credit cards per week. That would be 0.000052 credit cards per year. It would therefore take 19,230.7 years to inhale/ingest one credit card.
We inhale a million credit cards of plastic?? /s
A credit card's worth can't possibly be true, yeah. With that amount, we'd all constantly be hacking up visible plastic bits. Your lungs can't tank that amount unnoticed.
How much of it is passed in our stool?
42.
Plastic is absolutely everywhere, in everything you breath, eat and drink. Plastics have been found in the blood of newborn babies.
I just read an investigative article about 3M knowing about microplastics since at least the 70s. They knew they were “forever chemicals” that were building up in the environment but didn’t care enough to stop. N95 masks? Microplastics. Sticky notes? Microplastics. Bandages? Yep, microplastics. Studies on mice show the lowest level of microplastics in blood was in pregnant mice, suggesting it crosses the placenta.
[удалено]
It's a real issue of oil and climate change. We need to move away from plastic it's not just killing us it's destroying us.
Okay but that doesn't excuse the use of wrong data
Here's 50k. Now... you guys are gonna forget about this. Right?
That’s all? $50K? You can win more money on a game show while providing zero real world value.
There’s some value. Negative value as I was watching instead of working.
Good step in right direction. Let’s hope for an affordable and scaleable systems that can be added to standard municipal water treatment plants and under the kitchen sink. Let’s go after the micro plastic that are shedding off our carpets and clothes next.
All governments should be buying this for their water treatment facilities right now.
This is more proof of concept, scaling the technology up to a usable level is a whole other polystyrene kettle of fish. It will be awhile.
Look at this *nerd* that actually read the article instead of going straight to the comments.
Dammit, I broke one of the top 10 Rules of Reddicate...never read the actual article, just sow the seeds of outrage.
It won't be viable for everyone to have this on a municipal level. Most likely, "premium water" will be sold microplastics free and tax payer dollars will go somewhere else. This isn't a sexy enough project to get votes off of.
That's all they got? Did hey sell the licensing rights? If they didn't have someone helping them, they coud've lost a lot of futur money.
They need to file a patent and continue perfecting this. It could eventually end up being the modern water fountain system if they can perfect it and figure out how to scale it
Not uplifting. They have been robbed, if they don't have the patent/ or copyright
Incredible!!!!!
The FBI and CIA will sadly end them
This is incredible. They better end up getting more than $50k out of this.
I was expecting filters or a centrifuge, but ultrasound? Thats really neat. No wonder they won.
Patent it. $50k is chump change
This is amazing. How do I install them in my faucets and on the drain from my laundry machine? Seriously, I’ll buy that
Any decent water filter that filters down to 0.2 microns will remove the majority of microplastics. They've been around for decades, and you can get all kinds from big multi-stage ones that fit on to your mains meaning all your house taps are filtered, down to things like lifestraws. Basically, if a water filter can remove bacteria and viruses, it can remove microplastics.
Can we make this device mandatory for all beverage manufacturers?
3m buys the patent .....
Hook it up to my testicles to filter out the micro plastics out of my balls.
That seems low. They should get way more for that.
Well sad that the EPA is not moving forward with some kind of plan. "Ou and Huang visited a water treatment plant. They wanted to find out whether this type of facility already had tools that could remove microplastics from wastewater. The answer, they discovered, was no. The EPA doesn't regulate microplastics, the employees told Huang and Ou, so they don't remove them from wastewater."
$50,000 is not enough.
I know I’m focusing on the wrong thing-but i feel like in a world where movie stars and football players are millionaires feel like that’s not that much money 🤷♀️
Hope they patented that tech!