Fridaygram: Science Fair winners, crowd-sourced comet, Olympic salute

By Scott Knaster, Google Developers Blog Editor

This year’s Google Science Fair launched in January and attracted young scientists from more than 100 countries, who created thousands of projects. The judges performed the difficult task of choosing the finalists, who were rewarded with a trip to Google’s office in scenic Mountain View, California. Following a final round of judging, three winning projects were chosen:

• Jonah Kohn for “Good Vibrations: Improving the Music Experience for People with Hearing Loss Using Multi-Frequency Tactile Sound”.
• Iván Hervías Rodríguez, Marcos Ochoa, and Sergio Pascual for “La Vida Oculta del Agua (The Secret Life of Water)”.
• Brittany Wenger for “Global Neural Network Cloud Service for Breast Cancer”.

The Science Fair is especially impressive when you consider that all entrants are 18 years old or younger, and some of us have t-shirts older than that. Congratulations to all the winners and near-winners!

If you were thinking of using “crowd-sourced astronomy” as your future science fair project, take note: your idea is not original. A team of researchers at Princeton University recently reconstructed the 2007 orbit of Comet Holmes using images taken by amateur photographers and found by Yahoo image search. They then used a cool app called Astrometry.net to help figure out how to put the images together.

Finally, the Olympic Games opening ceremony in London is happening today, and we’d like to pay tribute here to Trevor Barron, an olympian who also participated in Google Summer of Code. Trevor's coding project involves working with Benetech to implement text-to-speech for mathematical expressions. Good luck in the games, Trevor!


Each week our Fridaygram presents cool things from Google and elsewhere that you might have missed during the week. Fridaygram items aren't necessarily related to developer topics; they're just interesting to us nerds. This week we say goodbye to Sally Ride, pioneering astronaut and hero to many Earthlings.