Area High School Students Named Second-Place Winners in ExploraVision Program

From ExploraVision:

Local students from Arlington High School and Plainview-Old Bethpage John F. Kennedy High School in Lagrangeville and Plainview, respectively, have been named second-place national winners as part of the 24th annual Toshiba and NSTA (National Science Teachers Association) ExploraVision program, the world’s largest K-12 science competition. They will be honored in Washington, D.C. from June 9-11.

Since its inception in 1992, more than 360,000 students from across the U.S. and Canada have participated in the ExploraVision program. These local students were one of eight teams to be selected from a group of 24 regional winning teams.

ExploraVision Project 1, named "The VISOR," is a neuro-olfaction device for perceiving smell remotely. Technology for the transition of light and sound over long distances (e.g. TV and radio) has revolutionized society. On the contrary, the technology to perceive a smell remotely is in its infancy, and has severe limitations such as latency, residual and infidelity. Relying on electrodes positioned over the olfactory blub, the VISOR can sense neural signals triggered by smell and encode the signal into a file. The internet, Bluetooth and other data transfer mechanisms can transfer this file to a distant VISOR, where it can be decoded into electric waveforms. The VISOR recreates smell by electrically stimulating the olfactory bulb. This disruptive breakthrough overcomes shortcomings in prior arts. The VISOR can have profound impacts on education, entertainment, collaboration, e-commerce, rehabilitation and law enforcement.

ExploraVision Project 2 is an intra-neuromuscular, cellular regeneration promoter. Nerve damage and neurodegenerative disorders, like Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and Multiple Sclerosis, are infamous for their incurable nature. Neurons, being the highly specialized cells as they are, undergo virtually no cellular division, rendering reduced or diseased cell populations with no natural method of regeneration or healing. Through the future technology the group envisions, the group aims to improve the ability to apply modern stem cell research towards this problem in an efficient and highly potent manner. The technology consists of a personalized mesh lattice implant, designed to be surgically inserted into a damaged tissue, where it can release biochemical epigenetic factors to promote cell reprogramming into pluripotent stem cells and act as a structural guide for new cell growth. The team hopes that this technology will not only provide a viable treatment for neurodegeneration, but also serve to alleviate debilitating general tissue damage from injury and disease.