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Cassidy: Google science fair answers and raises questions:

By Mike Cassidy /Mercury News Columnis

Above photo: Sabera Talukder, 16, of Los Gatos presents her clean water science project:(Lauren Purkey )

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Here’s what a successful scientist looks like: Sabera Talukder is standing in an elegantly lighted hall at Google (GOOG), surrounded by peers from around the world, explaining how she designed a low-cost system to clean drinking water in developing countries.

One other thing: Talukder is a 16-year-old Los Gatos High School student.

“I had done it to really help people,” Talukder says of her year-long project inspired by a trip to Bangladesh that led to her Pani (“water” in Bengali) Purification system. Talukder was one of 15 finalists last week in the Google Science Fair. The room was filled with answers to difficult questions: how to increase yields for subsistence farmers; how to help the hearing impaired enjoy music; how to tackle meth addiction; and on and on — brilliant schemes by even more brilliant high school students from Swaziland, Ukraine, India, Malta, Spain, Canada, and the United States.

But I’d come in search of the answer to a different question: How do we get more kids more interested in science, technology, engineering and math? It’s a question that has caused hand-wringing for years. The United States, the worry goes, is falling behind in training students to work the jobs of tomorrow — and today for that matter.

No doubt there is more than one answer and I’ll explore some possibilities in this and future columns.

Certainly companies like Google, which will benefit from a better prepared workforce, have a role to play and its new science fair, like those hosted by Intel (INTC), Synopsis and others, is a good step. Sure a kid could be motivated to participate by the fair’s substantial prizes. Among them are $50,000 and $25,000 scholarships; a trip to the Galapagos archipelago aboard National Geographic’s Endeavour; internships at Google’s Zurich research site, the Fermi and CERN particle research labs and Lego’s headquarters and factory in Denmark; a classroom set of Google Chromebooks for schools back home and mentoring from Scientific American magazine staffers. (National Geographic, CERN, Lego and Scientific American are the fair’s co-sponsors.)

But when I asked Talukder what pushed her to submit her project, she didn’t mention any of the contest’s awards. Instead, she talked about a trip last summer to Bangladesh, where her father grew up, and how she seized on problems caused by poor water quality there. She talked about a father she met. His children were violently ill, presumably from drinking impure water. He’d heard about her interest in water. Could she test his family’s supply? Could she tell him whether water was making his family sick?

Talukder told me she didn’t need to test it. She already knew. “It’s all practically the same,” she says of areas of the country with bacteria and parasite-laden water. Instead, she vowed to come up with an affordable system to purify it.

“And if it doesn’t fix it,” she says she told herself, “then I’m going to go back and try and fix it again.”

Talukder came up with a solar-powered system that relies on filters, UV light and activated charcoal. She plans to deploy a few in Bangladesh this winter and will offer her design for free on the Web in the spirit of open-source design. It’s a terrific story, but Talukder knows that she had a lot going for her when it came to being encouraged to dig into science. Her father, an electrical engineer, and her mother, an architect, always encouraged her and her sister to seek their own answers to their own tough questions. She attends a top-notch school and lives in an affluent town.

“I am very fortunate to be living in Los Gatos,” she says. “And so I think to not help people, with what I’ve been given, would just be a crime.”

And so what about kids on the fringes, kids who might not be getting nudged toward science, technology, engineering and math? How do we reach them? It turns out Talukder has some ideas about that, too. She’s in touch with teachers at her elementary and middle schools. She’d like a chance to tell them that science and math are cool, says her father, Shah Talukder. She’d like to tell them that the disciplines are a means to an end that can go far beyond academic achievement. That’s one way that kids who aren’t thinking about science and the good it can do can be inspired.

“Not just her,” Shah Talukder says, “but all of these kids. If they go back to the community, go back to the schools and explain what they’re doing. Kids listen to kids.”

And in fact, that’s one thing Google is banking on, says Vint Cerf, Google’s chief Internet evangelist and one of the science fair judges. Cerf, who was a key player in developing the Internet, says the Web has the power to link these brilliant kids with other kids.

“We want other kids to know that their contemporaries can accomplish these things,” he says.

Think about it. Just maybe a kid armed with that knowledge will find a way to unleash his or her own scientific brilliance. A brilliance that without a friendly shove never would have been unleashed.

Help Save the Water™ – click here.

I was born in the early 1960s in Seoul, Korea, and clean water was hard to come by. We bathed at the local bathhouses and had toilets outside of the home.

As a child, I remember we pumped our water from a well in our backyard. We were able to wash our hands, feet, and clothes with the well water, but never drink it.

My mother had a daily ritual of boiling our water in two to three pots at a time for at least one hour, then cooling it down for another hour before refrigerating a pitcher of clean water or making “boricha,” a roasted corn tea. This went on all day.

South Korea was a third-world country with poor infrastructure where municipal water was found only in large cities and on U.S. military bases. When my family immigrated to Monterey, Calif. in the summer of 1975, I was delighted to find out that we could drink water directly out of the faucet without boiling it. I especially enjoyed drinking fresh, cold water from our garden hose on a hot summer day after playing with my new neighborhood friends!

Today, 40 years later, you may believe that municipal water is clean and safe to drink, but too many disturbing studies show otherwise.

One investigation in the New York Times, for instance, found that American tap water contributes to rashes and skin burns, erodes tooth enamel, and often contains arsenic, lead, barium, and other toxic chemicals.

An Associated Press investigation found numerous contaminants in every state’s school water. Data from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) revealed 1 out of every 5 schools investigated violated the Safe Drinking Water Act during the past decade.

The EPA and Congress regulate over 100 pollutants and 91 chemicals through the Safe Drinking Water Act. Even so, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson admits that American water fails to meet public health goals, and water pollution law enforcement is unacceptably low.

These countless microorganisms and toxins in tap water can contribute to allergy symptoms and disease. Removing these chemicals from your drinking water will significantly reduce your internal toxic load and may improve your body’s natural ability to deal with allergy symptoms.

For day two of my book, The 7 Day Allergy Makeover, I focus on cleaning up your tap water and purifying it into optimal drinkable water. Pure water is an essential nutrient, the basis of fluids of all living organisms, and necessary to sustain life. Water needs to be clean, free of toxins and microbes to prevent disease.

Water is considered a universal solvent, which can aid in reducing your allergy symptoms through cellular hydration. Water ingestion can reduce illnesses by decreasing the concentration of toxin and inflammatory histamines, as well as increasing lymph and bowel movement to flush out contaminants, waste, and microbes.

I invite you to incorporate the following five steps into your lifestyle to safely remove toxins, particulates and microbes from tap water and get adequate amounts of purified water to decrease allergy symptoms and restore your health.

Step 1: Only Drink Purified Water — Water makes up approximately 60 percent of the human body. Your blood is 93 percent water and your muscles are about 75 percent water. Optimal water intake is an essential for human survival.

Tap, carbon filtered, alkaline, and even some bottled water contains chemicals, heavy metals, nuclear material, and potential allergens. By drinking purified water, you will minimize your exposure to contaminants and may potentially reduce your allergy symptoms.

Purified water comes from two methods of filtration: either distillation or reverse osmosis. Many patients ask me, “Isn’t distilled water — dead water? There are no minerals in it!”

Yes, both distilled and reverse osmosis water are devoid of minerals, but ingesting mineral-free purified water is not harmful to your body. A majority of third-world countries still drink rainwater. Warm, moist air rising up into the sky from evaporation of natural large bodies of water including rivers, lakes, and oceans builds clouds. Condensation of water vapor forms larger water droplets, and when the droplets are heavy enough they will fall from the clouds as rain. This process of water evaporation and condensation is the largest distillation process on Earth!

Rainwater is not “dead water!” Minerals are essential to our cellular metabolism, growth, and vitality, and we get majority of them from eating food, not drinking water. Eat plenty of vegetables, fruits, nuts, and seeds, and you will be optimally mineralized and alkalized.

Water bottling companies usually clean water using a triple purification system: carbon filtration (removes chlorine, chemicals and larger particulates), ozonation (eradicates microbes) and reverse osmosis (removes heavy metals, aluminum, nuclear waste.) You can buy purified drinking water in large bottles, preferably glass bottles, from delivery service companies and water service stores/clubs.

Help Save the Water™ – click here.