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Channel / Source:
TEDx Talks
Published: 2016-06-17
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ta7gwsvNgZo
little known so well it was a child's and I mean even more of a child that I have right now I used to love to play outside especially in the streams near my house the captivated me I was very curious child and the shoes were especially intriguing because they only seem to be changing is never the same water that I be splashing and never seemed frogs
that I'd catch and the streams I found that I really started to care about them and they became a significant part of my identity so several years later I got the opportunity to join the inaugural stem class of Bangor high school is a program focused on science technology engineering and math and how he didn't join it out of any particular love of science actually I was
%HESITATION is because the map I was that weird kid your member from middle school was absolutely obsessed with math and but as we progress through the program eye surgery lies that I actually really did love science and %HESITATION when I was when I was a sophomore I got the opportunity to take this class is called EP chemistry and in the class one week we did an
experiment a lab is a simple Beers lock Spearman %HESITATION is looking at the wavelengths of light in water but at the end of the spearmint my chemistry teacher Mister Kerry James he told us to go grab a sample of water from a stream your house era with a ponder a body of water in the lead analyze it and what we are looking for in the water
was this nutrient is called phosphorus and what phosphorus does is when it's in excessive levels in water it causes algal blooms and see probably seen on the beach the big hunks of green gunk and makes the rocks really slippery well it does more than just that the allergies algal blooms are very bad not only for the environment but also for human health so what happens is
that the the algae will block out the sunlight and prevent aquatic plants from growing and then later decompose and reduce the dissolved oxygen in the water preventing fish from surviving so you've got damaged plants image the fish and then most worryingly the algae will actually start produce these talks and sometimes they make the water nearly impossible to drink or use recreationally it actually turns it into
poison and causes a dermatitis and eczema on the skin and so learning about this process in eighty chemistry which is formally known as eutrophication I thought back to when I was a kid and I was playing in those streams and I thought wow you know how many others thousands and millions of kids are there around the world who don't even realize the water they're playing in
could be poise and and it was a logic is about to get a lot worse because we analyze that water sample and I could not believe how much phosphorus was in the water if shocking to me and I suppose that was really a turning point in my life and I realized that I wanted to do something about this to find out what was really polluting the
streams in my community and to do something about it to fix that pollution and so %HESITATION that summer I got started on a research project with the support of the stem program behind me I was very lucky odd to have this very supportive teacher Mister Kerry James he got me encontre with some are researchers at the university so I could learn the skills that I needed
to succeed in research and also to get the equipment that I needed %HESITATION it to build a lab in my basement which also kudos to my parents for letting me do that and not every dot every parents would let their kids put together a lab in their basement I hope so I got everything together and for the better part of seven months worked on collecting water
samples and analyzing them for various pollutants and is a long process but by the end of it I found out that my worst fears were true streams were significantly impair not only in phosphorus but also with E. coli and that that pollution was being contributed by storm water so if this point I definitely wanted to do something about it and I decided to switch gears my
project from the science side to the engineering side and %HESITATION so I started in on the engineering project the summer before my senior year and got started working on %HESITATION something is called salus nanofibers a filter Matt and so that is basically a fancy word for what Paul but I was hoping to filter out the E. coli and also absorb the phosphorous out with that filter
mac the problem was it didn't work at all it failed over and over and over no matter what I did I could get to work I actually worked on this for five months before I realized in November that I had no shot of getting it to work and that was a very low point because I had just spent five months of my life on something that
I couldn't even apply but as I was thinking over and I realized that there were lessons that I learned from that and there were research papers that I'd sought out in the process of of doing those experiments that actually gave me clues on where to go next and that that's also a very big part of research is reading the literature boring but very helpful and that's
sort of how it's at the foot of how I got to the next floor part of me in my research project %HESITATION I came up with %HESITATION something that actually worked and so yeah so I I for yet collected so this is what I came up with anyway %HESITATION I call my scaffolds and it's basically a bunch of complex chemicals mixed together and squeezed out into
a shape that looks a lot like a bowl of spaghetti and so the main structural component of the scaffold is %HESITATION called calcium alginate which is ironically I find this quite funny it's derived from algae so I'm taking a derivative of algae and using it to clean up phosphorus which then reduces algae and you don't have to laugh it's not really that funny but and %HESITATION
so the other component of its got two parts the other component is the active ingredient which is so where you don't have to remember this it's magnesium aluminum layered double hydroxide so there won't be a quiz so and so with those two Arab chemicals they work together to absorb massive quantities of phosphorus in fact the one I a picture up there %HESITATION that's just one gram
of the scaffold that can absorb enough phosphorus to clean it too large boiler tanks full of contaminated water in just a few days for four cents very expensive as well and so I also had a and so would the scaffolds but you got to have some way to get them in the water can just toss them in so I also came up with an idea of
how to implement the scaffolds %HESITATION using actually just stuff I bought at Walmart Ian's so this is what I came up with your scaffold housing it's a block of foam and some hair clips and actually we don't have a picture up there but %HESITATION I cut the sleeves off of a men's extra large T. shirt and so that so that %HESITATION you would go around the
outside when those clips are holding the scaffold and prevent the fish for eating them I think that's necessary because Fisher rather stupid Ennore also very hungry I think so %HESITATION what I plan to do with the scaffolds is is take them and float them in something called a storm water detention ponds and so this is one picture right up there and it's basically a basing puppy
seen them around towns another some in Bangor %HESITATION and it takes the storm water from a wide area and concentrated into a single basin where it's held for a dumb to weeks and allows the sentiment to settle out and that reduces some of the phosphorus and so I'm taking advantage of the structure to also observe phosphorus the dissolved phosphorus in my own way and they could
also be deployed in other places like farm ponds or storm water holding tanks even catch basins Richard below those storm a great C. seed you're driving a rope work everyday and so %HESITATION but these these scaffolds are %HESITATION so did they be deployed in the detention ponds but after that well but you with them you've got a hunk of jelly stuff with phosphorus embedded in it
what can you do well the answer lies in fertilizer the scaffolds can potentially be recycled as slow release fertilizer capsules since the calcium alginate is actually biodegradable and the phosphorus is absorbed as magnesium phosphate which is a major component of fertilizer so plan with the crops and even house plants it breaks down releases the phosphorus in the plants up take it slowly at its at their
own pace %HESITATION you know as opposed to you know you see everybody out there with the with the fertilizer pellets to spring them all over the garden well those fertilizer pellets they get washing the stream and that's part of where the fosters problem comes from in the first place so %HESITATION that's I think a big component %HESITATION I it's an important component of %HESITATION environmental solutions
in general thinking about all of the different consequences that your actions may have and you know because one solution may have may cause another problem down the line see I think you know sort of universally about it and also thinking universally about using and making the multipurpose because as I mentioned before equali is still an issue in Bangor streams so this summer I may be working
on also making the multipurpose making them so that they'll kill you call I know the bacteria using silver nanoparticles and also so that they'll absorb heavy metals like the lead that's plaguing flint Michigan and so that's you know I am not stopping here and I'm hoping home next year I'm gonna be at Stanford University which actually I'm very sad about because they have they do they
have one of the biggest water research programs in the country and so I want to turn this into a start up company and I want to start to produce the scaffolds and provide them to municipalities and farms all over the country and actually all over the world to sponsor isn't just limited to America it's a problem in Australia in China not America it pretty much anywhere
but it really none of this would have been possible without that stem education this is me Azomite greater home for break up right starting the stem programs %HESITATION so let's stem education kits start out naturally curious naturally creative yeah you know children are and those are really key year %HESITATION attributes that a scientist or engineer should have but there's a gap there between childhood and between
professional research life that often isn't filled well enough by education and that should really be the goal subjects in education is to prop provide children with the tools that they need the resources to learn how to become a researcher without losing their creativity and their curiosity and not trying to squeeze them into a single way of thinking because people want it we need different perspectives if
we're going to create innovations for the you tear and help solve a global climate change and other severe environmental issues so for the kids out there in the audience I have something for you you are never too young to see a problem and try to fix it and I see try because you will fail I can guarantee that the first time you try you're probably gonna
fail and again and again and again but eventually they're often comes a success and it's that it's in a process of failure that you learn for the future for how it is so you prize the success and if it's really quite a few lessons can come from failure and it's definitely a large part of scientific life and and scientific researches experiencing that failure and so also
I think is important is %HESITATION embracing irony cus I if I could I would still find it very funny that I'm using something's derived from algae to cleanup outings so think about it what can you DO to further stem education and therefore innovation in Maine because it's only with some education that we can get to innovation
