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12 brilliant kids who give us hope for the future
After seeing an image of two child slaves from Nepal with stones on their backs in 2012, Harr, who was only 8 at the time, realized her mission: to end child slavery.
That was three years ago.
Today, Harr's company, the Make A Stand Foundation, has raised over $25,000 selling four varieties of "lemon-aid" and donating a portion of the sales to charities like UNICEF and Free The Slaves.
Suarez gave a TED talk in 2011 when he was just 12 years old, showing off the games he'd been working on, including one called "Bustin Jieber," in which players try to catch Justin Bieber as he scurries around the screen.
At the time, Suarez would show off the apps to kids at his school and consistently get asked how he made them. So he started an app club, where kids could come to learn about the finer points of app developing.
Nowadays, the 16-year-old is running his own company to improve the 3D-printing industry with a printer of his own, known as ORB. The printer features a spinning disc, similar to a vinyl record player, that Suarez says works 10 times faster than any printer available today.
At 13, Banda's community was already preparing her for marriage, a local custom known as kusasafumbi.
But as she explained in her TED talk earlier this year, "I said no, because I knew where I was going. I knew what I wanted in life. I had a lot of dreams as a young girl."
She urged her community to pass a law forbidding child marriage, an effort that eventually took her to Malawi's parliament. Now the legal age of marriage is 18, not 15, and it all started with Banda's brave act.
The two Adams' sisters began their nonprofit as a small table set up at a local Starbucks in Texas. The initial success — more than $10,000 raised in the first two months — overfunded their first well in Ethiopia, so they kept growing.
The girls and their family visit impoverished areas to help locals drill wells.
"Our biggest successes have come because of doing a little bit of work each day," they told Tech Insider back in August. "Start small if you need to, but stick to it and it's amazing what you can accomplish."
The girls and their family have already sold more than $650,000 worth of handmade paper ornaments that have funded the drilling of 70 wells in Africa, India, Peru, Mexico, and even the US.
In developing countries, having a vaccine available isn't always enough.
When doctors have to transport those vaccines between cities and rural towns, the vaccines risk losing their effectiveness because they get too warm, Ganesan told Tech Insider,
At this year's Google Science Fair, Ganesan won the LEGO Education Builder Award fori VAXXWAGON, a device he invented that rigs together a plastic cooler and a bicycle so that the person delivering the vaccine powers the thermos as she rides.
VAXXWAGON saves the day, and perhaps a life.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one person infected with the flu virus could spread the disease to up to 17 other people on an airplane, mostly through coughing and sneezing.
When Raymond Wang, a high school junior, learned that fact late last year, he got to work on a device that could help minimize the spread.
He's the inventor of a $10 device called the Global Inlet Director — a curved piece of plastic that can be attached to an existing airplane cabin to help redirect the flow of air inside.
The invention earned Wang the top prize at this year's Intel Science and Engineering Fair, the Gordon E. Moore Award.
Five years after the now-teenager noticed her family's water had a slight brown color to it, 16-year-old Grimmett won the 2015 Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology for her innovative method for purifying water.
According to the young inventor, tiny pieces of resin (the plastic beads) pull out an antibiotic called sulfamethazine, which is traditionally used by veterinarians on cows and pigs, and is commonly found in water supplies in rural areas.
Grimmett's work was published in the Journal of Environmental Quality in 2013. She was just 14 years old, the youngest to publish in that journal.
Earlier this September, 16-year-old Hallisey won the 2015 Google Science Fair for her method of Ebola detection, which she says works in less than 30 minutes. Other models can take up to 12 hours.
Hallisey's test mixes specific chemicals with a person's blood sample and changes color if the chemicals react with a key protein in the Ebola virus. What makes her test even more innovative is that it needs no refrigeration to preserve the Ebola if it's found.
This makes it far less expensive than alternatives and more easily transportable to rural, low-income areas that lack electricity.
In the same way that a Brita water filter stops foreign particles from getting into your water, Srisai's contraption uses corn cobs to purify the unclean drinking water found in many parts of the world.
She first got the idea after taking long walks in her home country of India, where armfuls of dried corn cobs could be seen lying on the side of the road. She began testing her methods in 2011, when she was just 11 years old.
Srisai believes that she could market the device to farmers as a low-cost way to stay healthy. The device removes 80% of contaminants, including detergents, oils, and other particulates. The average Brita filter removes 99%.
Srisai's invention won the Scientific American's Community Impact Award at this year's Google Science Fair.
Bridges started his business when he was just 9 years old as a way to brighten up the world and make it a happier place.
After appearing on ABC's "Shark Tank" and securing a mentorship with entrepreneur Daymond John, Bridges' company took off. It is reportedly worth upward of $200,000 — not bad for a 13-year-old.
As a gesture of good will, Bridges has used some of the revenue from Mo's Bows to send 10 kids from his hometown to summer camp.
In 2009, at the age of 11, Yousafzai began secretly detailing her experiences living under Taliban rule in Pakistan. She wrote for the BBC using a pseudonym to protect her identity.
In 2014, after years of struggling to bring the Taliban's brutal injustices to light, and almost dying in the process, she won the Nobel Peace Prize at only 17 years old.
Today, the 18-year-old is the most iconic figure fighting for women's rights in the Middle East.
On February 28, Axel Springer, Business Insider's parent company, joined 31 other media groups and filed a $2.3 billion suit against Google in Dutch court, alleging losses suffered due to the company's advertising practices.
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