South African teen Kiara Nirghin has won the grand prize at the Google Science Fair 2016.
Sixteen-year-old Nirghin from Johannesburg's St Martin's High School scooped the $50 000 (R682 000) prize money for her 'No More Thirsty Crops' innovation.
The Google Science Fair is a global online competition open to students aged 13 to 18. It invites the brightest young minds from around the world to answer one question: how can they make the world better through science, math and engineering.
To qualify for the competition held on Tuesday at Google's headquarters in California, Nirghin first won the Google Science Fair Community Impact Award in the hotly-contested Africa and Middle East region. She won R14 000 at that competition.
With the Southern African region experiencing its worst drought in more than two decades, she come up with a way of keeping crops hydrated for longer, at a much lower cost.
Using orange peels and avocado skins, the teen created a material that can hold hundreds of times its weight in water, in the soil. This super-absorbent polymer then acts as a water reservoir in the earth.
Nirghin says science has been coursing through her veins since a very young age. "I vividly remember at the age of seven experimenting with vinegar and baking soda solutions in plastic cups. My natural curiosity and questioning nature has sparked my everlasting love of science," she says.
It's her love of chemistry and physics that saw her win, with Google receiving thousands of entries from 107 countries.
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