13-year-old San Jose girl wins top prize, $25,000 at STEM competition

Young people are very anxious about the changing climate and warming planet.
According to a landmark survey published in the Lancet, an overwhelming number of young people feel anxious, angry, and powerless about climate change.
Even so, there’s optimism and creativity generated by our youth.
Take for example a solution that was developed by a young girl from the South Bay for filtering water. Clean drinking water is essential for life, but climate change is worsening supplies by increasing the risk of severe drought.
“Actually, two billion people don’t have access to clean drinking water. And that’s what inspired my project: to be able to find a nearly zero cost way to be able to filter water,” remarked San Jose middle school student Tina Jin.
Jin is just 13 years old, but the middle school student is wise beyond her years. She met with CBS News Bay Area at the Public Library in Cupertino and was accompanied by her mother Mary.
“This is my awesome, amazing mom. She’s the best cook on earth and also very supportive and very nice,” enthused the student, with her arm around her smiling mother.
Mrs. Jin recently traveled with her daughter to Washington, D.C., where the young student completed in the nation’s premier Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math or STEM competition.
It’s known as the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge.  Each year, the contest attracts roughly 65,000 middle school students. Tina Jin was one of 30 finalists.
“I wanted to find a way to use natural materials as material for a water filter,” she explained.
Jin noticed inside animal bones, there are many tiny holes that resemble a commercial water filter. The honeycomb structure makes the bones porous. That gave her an idea. But first she needed a stash of bones to see if they could filter dirty water. 
She thought about something her mom always said when buying meat.
“I remember my mom always complains about how much in one pound of meat there’s probably more bone than meat,” laughed Tina. 
The student began collecting animal bones after family meals that otherwise would have been discarded. She began to use them in her research and experimented on them to see if they could filter dirty water.  
At first, she saw only a portion of the animal bones worked. So she decided to make the structures in the bones more accessible by grinding them up.
She ground the bones up and strained dirty water through a portable filter made with discarded bones and easily available household supplies. An independent outside expert verified that Tina’s filter worked.
“By grinding the animal bones, you can use all the parts of the bone and so by grinding the animal bones into powder, my filter was able to work successfully,” said Jin. 
The young student’s work so impressed the judges that she won the top prize known as the ASCEND (Aspiring Scientists Cultivating Exciting New Discoveries) Award, which comes with $25,000.
CBS News Bay Area asked her mom what she thought, and the student translated for her mom.
“My mom said she was just so excited. She was speechless,” smiled Jin.
The student plans to save the money for college and is applying for patent. She also feels that — despite the rapid warming of the planet due to climate change — there is still hope.
“No one can do everything, but everyone can do something,” she said.
Her animal bone water filter is a “bone-afide” success.