Deepika Kurup won the title, “young scientist of the year” by inventing a water jug that changes dirty water into, drinkable, purified water. Drinking water contamination can come from acid rain, storm water runoff, pesticide runoff, and industrial waste. Common ways to clean the water are by filtration and uvc radiation. One of the main problems that needed to be figured out was how for the coating on the inside of a water bottle, (which is now Tio2) not to wash off after many uses or for it to block UV radiation. To solve that she placed a photo catalytic rod inside the bottle, this was going to be in contact with water and UV radiation. Next, she had to find a binding agent. She tried a lot of different product and decided that cement would be the best. She then created he photo catalytic composite with cement and sand. She tested it and it ended up working but couldn’t use that material: it was too heavy.
The author is informing us about what is going on in other parts of the world like India. 1/6th of the world’s population doesn’t have access to clean drinking water. Getting access to clean drinking water has now been named one of the grand challenges. She is trying to inform us how bad this problem will get if we don’t do something about it soon. She wants us to know that even in five minutes, 15 children can die from not having enough clean drinking water.

Kurup then found a substance called 3M glass bubbles that are light-weight and UV transparent. She then had to find the best ratio of the materials and then concluded that that best ration was 1 ZnO: 4 TiO2: 25 3M glass bubbles: 100 cement. When UV radiation hits the jug, something forms around the binding which keeps the DNA from duplicating, then finally destroying it. Kurup built many prototypes then tested to see if the bacteria would be destroyed. She used water from the national waste water human facility. She concluded that her invention “prevented the re-growth of bacteria unlike current SODIS methods and that the material did not wash off after several uses.”

I thought that this was a really cool invention because of how many lives it could save. I also thought that this was sad because I learned how many lives are taken each day due to lack of clean water. In just on day that could save almost 5000 lives in one day and over 60,000 lives in one year.