The Educational CyberPlayGround  offers their heartfelt congratulations and the smart ePants award to the to the wonderful teenagers mentioned below!!!
Go Teens! Yippie Yi Yo Kiyaaaaaaaaa!
http://www.businessinsider.com/2013-google-science-fair-finalists-2013-9?op=1#ixzz2fR1QREZ1
The Grand Prize winner will receive a 10-day trip to the Galapagos Islands with National Geographic Expeditions, $50,000 in scholarship funding and more.
Elif Bilgin has developed a way to use banana peels to make bio-plastics, instead of relying on traditional petroleum. She comes from Turkey, and is 16.
Ann Makosinski is a 16-year-old Canadian. For her project, she designed a flashlight that runs solely off of body heat.
These three 16-year-old Singaporean girls studied how sex hormones like estrogen and progesterone help prevent and heal liver scarring. They studied rat liver cells in culture, treating them with the hormones to see if they could heal the inflamed cells.
Valerie Ding is a 16-year-old from Oregon. Her project involves optimizing a new solar technology called quantum dot solar cells — which could theoretically be twice as efficient as solar cells currently on the market.
Shrishti Asthana, a 15-year-old from India, has developed a green way to degrade these detergents, leaving the water cleaner. She uses nanoZnO and sun light to treat the water and degrade the detergents.
Charalampos Ioannou is an 18-year-old from Greece. He developed a exoskeleton glove that helps people with disabilities that limit how strong their hands are.  Sensors in the glove work with the person’s hand to amplify their movements.
 
17-year-old Esha Maiti hails from California. She developed a computer code to better understand breast cancer. She was motivated by the death of her grandmother two years ago. Better understanding of how cancers spread will help doctors decide on treatment options.
 
Elizabeth Zhao wants to see your skin. Or, she wants a computer to see it.  The 17-year-old from Oregon developed a computer algorithm that scans images of moles to determine if they are cancerous. She says it works with about 80% accuracy and could be used as a preliminary diagnosis tool — calling attention to strange-looking moles that might be cancerous, so a doctor can look at it and biopsy it, in hopes of an early diagnosis of this deadly cancer.
The flu virus is deadly and costs millions of dollars in lost productivity. The emergence of a new strain could be a potential epidemic. Eric Chen, a 17-year-old from California, is working to design new drugs to fight this deadly infection. He did so by finding compounds that turn off a viral protein called the “endonuclease.”
 
Cryptography is important in creating secure communications. Vinay Iyengar’s project makes these communications safer and faster than before. He’s a 17-year-old Junior at the Oregon Episcopal School in Portland, Oregon.
Finding inspiration in how squid and other sea creatures move, 13-year-old Texan Alex Spiride has created a new way to propel underwater vehicles, which he named the squid-jet.  His own love of swimming inspired him to find a way to improve underwater vehicles.
Humans have a huge impact on the world around us, especially when we build big structures that interfere with nature. 14-year-old Venkat Sankar from California is hoping to design computer simulations to better understand how these kinds of projects impact the species in the area.
Kavita Selva is a 13-year-old Texan worried about the rare-earths crisis. Rare-earths are special metals that are incredibly rare but used in motors and batteries. China controls 97% of this industry and has been restricting their export of these important minerals.  Selva hoped to determine a way to use less of these rare-earths in our magnets.