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Loading...Teen Girls Saving Lives With Award-Winning Invention (VIDEO)
A group of four girls from Rochester, New York have developed an ingenious, low-tech method for pasteurizing milk to make sure it’s safe for human consumption. The group, calling themselves the Hippie Pandas, heard about the plight of women being sickened by unsafe milk in Nicaragua from a relative in the Peace Corps and decided to create an easy way for people in rural areas to pasteurize their milk.
The invention is simple – by laying a piece of aluminum foil over cardboard or a woven mat, they’re able to reflect the sun and generate heat. A black receptacle holding the milk absorbs the heat. After 30 minutes of exposure at 145 degrees, harmful pathogens in the milk are killed, helping prevent diseases such as tuberculosis, and prevent potential miscarriages.
Initially, the Hippie Pandas were monitoring their project with a thermometer – but when they realized that people in undeveloped areas might not have access to a thermometer, they came up with an alternate solution. They covered the container with beeswax, and found that when it had fully melted, the pasteurization process was complete. Here’s a video of the girls explaining how their invention works:
Their idea won them the 1st place Gracious Professionalism Award at the 2012 For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) Championship in St Louis earlier this month. Their invention is already being used in Nicaragua, with plans to introduce it in other countries soon.
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Read more: first championships, gifted, girls in science, invention, stem, women in science
Photo credit: Youtube Screen Capture
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101 comments
+ add your ownThank you for sharing this and letting me know that not all of today's youth are up to no good. It makes me feel a lot better about mankind to finally read good things happening in this crazy world we are living in, God bless all of you and keep up the great work!!!
nice
(: smart girls
Amazing!!!
At least those girls have kind, wonderful intentions! To boil milk that is what my mother was always doing. I think the third world's adults are not so stupide, they know how to survive.
bravo kids
Amazing .. BRAVO!!!
High five !
Good for them. With teens like these maybe there is hope for the world.
Raw milk is better IF you don't have an infected cow giving tainted milk. Then the solution is to boil it just like you do with water. This is the process that will do this for you.
And you aren't putting the aluminum in contact with the milk, you are putting it in contact with the container holding the milk, a black container at that. It's a reflector, it could also be a mirror, a sheet of steel, or something else. The point is to reflect the light onto the container heating it.
Anything that can help save lives is a bonus.
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