3M Young Scientist Challenge Announces 2025 National Finalists
The top 10 2025 3M Young Scientist Challenge finalists are as follows (in alphabetical order by last name):
'For 18 years, the 3M Young Scientist Challenge has empowered middle school students to bring science to life,' said Torie Clarke, 3M's executive vice president and chief public affairs officer. 'This year, the nation's brightest young minds have once again reimagined what's possible. Congratulations to each of the top 10 finalists! I can't wait to see how you make the world a better place.'
To learn more about the 3M Young Scientist Challenge and meet the 2025 finalists, visit YoungScientistLab.com.
Challenge detailsThis year's finalists – 10 students ranging in age from 11-14 – identified an everyday problem and submitted a one- to two-minute video on their proposed scientific solution. Their proposals fall under an expanded set of entry categories, including robotics, home improvement, automotive, safety, AR/VR, and climate technology.
An esteemed group of judges, including 3M scientists and leaders in education from across the country, evaluated entries based on creativity, scientific knowledge, and communication effectiveness.
Next stepsEach of the 10 finalists will participate in an exclusive summer mentorship program with a 3M scientist. These mentors will provide guidance and advice to help advance their finalist's solution. Then, from Oct. 13-14, each finalist will travel to the 3M Innovation Center in St. Paul, Minn., for the final interactive competition.
At 3M, each finalist will participate in a series of challenges, including a presentation of their completed innovation, and be scored independently by a panel of judges. The grand prize winner will be announced, and they will receive $25,000, a unique destination trip, and the title of America's Top Young Scientist.
Previous winnersPrevious challenge finalists and 3M scientists have collaborated to create solutions for a wide variety of real-world problems, including cybersecurity, coral reef health, water conservation, food waste, alternative energy sources, energy consumption, air pollution, and transportation efficiency.
The 2024 winner – 14-year-old Sirish Subash from Snellville, Georgia. – created PestiSCAND, a handheld device designed to detect pesticide residues on produce using a non-destructive method. The innovation employs spectrophotometry, which involves measuring how light of various wavelengths is reflected off the surface of fruits and vegetables. A machine-learning model then analyzes this data to determine the presence of pesticides.
Now in its eighteenth year, the 3M Young Scientist Challenge continues to inspire and challenge middle school students to think creatively and apply the power of STEM to discover real-world solutions. Former America's Top Young Scientists have given TED Talks, filed patents, founded nonprofits, made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, and exhibited at the White House Science Fair. These young innovators have also been named TIME Magazine's Kid of the Year; featured in The New York Times Magazine, Forbes, and Business Insider; and appeared on national television programs such as Good Morning America, The Kelly Clarkson Show, and more. In addition, a 3M Young Scientist Challenge Alumni Network was formed in fall 2022 and includes more than 100 former challenge winners, finalists, and mentors, who take part in networking opportunities and more.
'The 3M Young Scientist Challenge exemplifies the power of nurturing student curiosity by preparing students for the future, today. We are delighted to celebrate these young scientists for their commitment to solving real-world problems with innovation, creativity, and ingenuity,' said Amy Nakamoto, Executive Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Partnerships at Discovery Education.
The award-winning competition supplements the 3M and Discovery Education program Young Scientist Lab, which provides no-cost dynamic digital resources for students, teachers, and families to explore, transform, and innovate the world around them. All the resources are also available on Discovery Education Experience, the essential companion for engaged PreK-12 classrooms.
###
About 3M3M (NYSE: MMM) believes science helps create a brighter world for everyone. By unlocking the power of people, ideas and science to reimagine what's possible, our global team uniquely addresses the opportunities and challenges of our customers, communities, and planet. Learn how we're working to improve lives and make what's next at 3M.com/news-center.
About Discovery EducationDiscovery Education is the worldwide edtech leader whose state-of-the-art, Pre-K-12, digital solutions support learning wherever it takes place. Through award-winning multimedia content, instructional supports, innovative classroom tools, and strategic alliances, Discovery Education helps educators deliver powerful learning experiences that engage all students and support higher academic achievement on a global scale. Discovery Education serves approximately 4.5 million educators and 45 million students worldwide, and its resources are accessed in over 100 countries and territories. Through partnerships with districts, states, and trusted organizations, Discovery Education empowers teachers with essential edtech solutions that inspire curiosity, build confidence, and accelerate learning. Explore the future of education at www.discoveryeducation.com.
ContactsTim Post 3MEmail: [email protected]
Grace MaliskaDiscovery EducationEmail: [email protected]
Visit 3BL Media to see more multimedia and stories from Discovery Education
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
23 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Should You Take a Vitamin B12 Supplement?
Credit - Photo-Illustration by TIME (Source Images: eyenigelen/Getty Images, Sersol/Getty Images) Everyone needs vitamin B12: It helps the body produce red blood cells and maintain healthy brain function, along with so many other things. But are you getting enough of it? Here's what to know about vitamin B12 and whether you should consider upping your levels. A boon for brain health 'Vitamin B12 is important for brain health because it helps protect nerve cells in the brain, which support memory and thinking skills,' says Michelle Routhenstein, a preventive cardiology dietitian and certified diabetes educator in New York. It's water-soluble, so the body does not store it in large amounts, and daily intake is essential. The current federal recommendations are for adults to get 2.4 mcg of vitamin B12 per day. Great food sources of B12 include seafood like oysters, salmon and tuna, beef, and fortified products like nutritional yeast, plant-based milks, some breads and breakfast cereals, says Routhenstein. But some recent research suggests that some people may need even more than that. Vitamin B12 deficiencies can impact your brain function even when your intake levels are considered normal, says Dr. Ari J. Green, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco's department of ophthalmology. In a recent study, Green and his colleagues found that people with B12 levels that were technically normal but on the lower end of the range had impaired brain function. 'We could detect neurological impairment at levels currently considered 'normal,' independently of other factors like years of education," particularly in older people, says Dr. Alexandra Beaudry-Richard, a resident at McGill University and co-author of the study. 'To us, this should reinvigorate a conversation about how much B12 is needed for optimal neurological function.' Read More: Should You Take a Vitamin D Supplement? Other studies have found that people with Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment tend to have lower B12 levels—and supplementation with B12 can reduce the rate of brain atrophy. However, on the opposite end, the study showed signs of a possible detrimental effect on the brain when people had high B12 levels in their blood. 'This warrants further studies to evaluate what healthy B12 levels are on both ends of the spectrum,' says Dr. Ahmed Abdelhak, one of the study's authors and a clinical instructor in neurology at UCSF School of Medicine. Should you take a B12 supplement? You can (and should) get B12 from your diet, but some people may have a tough time getting adequate levels of the nutrient from food alone. Older adults are more likely to develop vitamin B12 deficiencies because the vitamin requires stomach acid to be absorbed, and stomach acid production starts to decline with age. Routhenstein recommends people look closer into their B12 status starting around age 50 or if they are at higher risk of a B12 deficiency. This category includes vegans and vegetarians, people taking specific medications that interfere with B12 absorption such as metformin or proton pump inhibitors, and those who have gastrointestinal disorders like Crohn's, celiac, or atrophic gastritis. You can get tested for a vitamin B12 deficiency at your annual physical. If you are deficient, your doctor might recommend supplementation. Read More: 7 Surprising Symptoms of Lyme Disease The UCSF study authors recommend checking levels starting at age 70, but you can get it checked on a standard blood test at any age through your primary care physician. Dr. Ralph Green, a professor of pathology and lab medicine at the University of California, Davis—and another author on that recent study—says that checking B12 may also be valuable for people who have unexplained symptoms that have been linked to B12 deficiency. For those with declining gastric function, he says taking supplements is likely the best way to promote absorption, and the level of supplementation a person should consume depends on whether their absorption is normal or not. Pregnant women, too, need higher B12 intake to support fetal brain development; if you're pregnant, consult with your ob-gyn about optimal B12 levels for you. What kind of B12 supplement is best? B12 in supplements and fortified foods can be more easily absorbed than from food, especially for older adults and those with absorption issues, says Routhenstein. If your doctor has advised you to take a B12 supplement, it's best to ask them to recommend specific dosages and brands. But Routhenstein recommends following these general guidelines when selecting a B12 supplement. Always look for those with methylcobalamin on the label, as this is the most bioavailable form of B12, meaning the body can absorb it the best. It's also the optimal form for heart and brain health and nerve function, she says. Sublingual (under the tongue) or liquid B12 is often touted for better absorption. This form of B12 does so 'by bypassing the digestive system and entering the bloodstream directly,' says Routhenstein. Of course, no supplement is a cure-all, and there are other ways to support brain health, including maintaining a healthy diet and exercise regimen. Activities that stimulate multiple brain areas simultaneously are excellent at promoting cognitive longevity, Beaudry-Richard says. Practicing a musical instrument, dancing, and studying a foreign language daily, for example, all recruit 'brain circuits responsible for vision, hearing, movement, emotions' and more. 'It's like a full-body workout for the brain,' she says. Contact us at letters@
Medscape
an hour ago
- Medscape
New Tools for Lung Cancer, Harder Job for Clinicians
This transcript has been edited for clarity. Hello. It's Mark Kris, from Memorial Sloan Kettering, with a month-later review of the 2025 ASCO meeting in Chicago. I think everybody who was there and attended the lung cancer sessions left with the, I'll have to say, difficult time unpacking what we learned during that meeting. There was a dizzying array of trials presented and a huge amount of data, but sadly, there was no breakthrough. There was no one treatment or approach that told each of us we had to start doing this in every patient on Tuesday when we got home again. What it did was give us more tools and more ways we could fight cancers, but it really made our jobs much harder. I think that we need to spend some time thinking about how those data could be used, and I'll pick a couple of examples. I think one would be in the small cell lung cancer area. There was a large amount of attention to the use of tarlatamab as a treatment at relapse. It was a comparison trial to topotecan and lurbinectedin, and there was an improvement in outcomes in those groups. While that benefit was there, what was not addressed was the benefit of repeating standard therapy, which is what many of us do, particularly when there has been a longer time between the end of the induction treatment and recurrence. The second trial that I thought was useful in the small cell area was a randomized trial adding lurbinectedin to the checkpoint inhibitor after induction chemotherapy. There was an improvement in disease-free survival there also. Personally, I was more impressed by the latter trial, in that it gave our patients a longer time with disease control rather than focusing the time of relapse, where people may already have suffered symptoms brought on by the progressive lung cancer — which sadly is an all-too-common occurrence. In the perioperative space, my colleague Jamie Chaft reported on neoadjuvant osimertinib. In her trial of osimertinib alone, osimertinib plus chemotherapy, and osimertinib and chemotherapy alone, they showed a benefit for the osimertinib-containing arms but not a clear benefit of osimertinib alone versus osimertinib plus chemotherapy. What's the take-home message there? Well, again, it's not simple. I think that we need to give chemotherapy to every patient with stage IB disease and beyond, whether they have an EGFR mutation or not. Based on the fact that we can give chemotherapy more safelyand more completely in the neoadjuvant setting, I would tend to use osimertinib with chemotherapy upfront and then surgery. If you do go the other way and use osimertinib alone, you would need to give chemotherapy afterward, which is, frankly, tougher. I think my take-home message from that was osimertinib and chemotherapy, our standard of care for advanced disease, should also be our standard for neoadjuvant disease in patients with EGFR mutations. There was a fantastic lecture by Patricia LoRusso, from Yale, about antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs). I think that was the most confusing moment of all during the ASCO meeting — the number of ADCs under evaluation. Yet, as Dr LoRusso pointed out, despite the number, it's the same targets, largely the same warheads, and very often, antibodies without activity in and of themselves. When you look at the overall benefits of the group, there are none that truly stand out. We now have three available in the lung cancer arena. The benefit, side effects, and the whole field is really quite confusing. One other message was that, with the bispecific antibodies, the more targets you have, the more toxicity you're going to see. It's a real balance between benefit and risk. What are you going to do? Again, there was no breakthrough at ASCO this year. Clearly, there are more therapies and there are even more in the pipeline. I think what we need to do now is to learn more, and to — unfortunately — spend a large amount of time going through the data and see exactly the benefit versus risk ratio for each of the new therapies and for each of our patients deciding where that goes. For example, I would be a big fan of giving lurbinectedin because of its ability to improve disease-free survival, which is so important in small cell [lung cancer], where relapse is almost certain, and that disease-free time is the best time for our patients. For the neoadjuvant, it would be giving both chemotherapy and osimertinibpre-surgery, in that is better tolerated there and you can also assess benefit very well. For tarlatamab, it's a tough decision there. Again, it's the time of relapse. We have many choices at relapse, giving the same drugs again, giving another perhaps less toxic agent like temozolomide, giving tarlatamab and the standard drugs. Clearly, tarlatamab was better than some of the standard drugs, but they're not the ones that most of us use for the patients. We usually go with the same treatment by and large. Lastly, it's going to be incumbent on us to work harder to take that information we got at ASCO this year and make the best decisions for each patient. We have to focus on the nuance. We have to learn more, and there is no knee-jerk that every patient needs tarlatamab or every patient should get induction chemotherapy with the combination. We have to choose our patients wisely. You've heard me before, and I'll say it again. Our jobs are better, but they're harder.
WIRED
an hour ago
- WIRED
RFK Jr. Is Supporting mRNA Research—Just Not for Vaccines
Aug 13, 2025 2:07 PM HHS is slashing hundreds of millions in funding for mRNA vaccines and infectious disease treatments, but leaving the door open to mRNA therapies for cancer and genetic conditions. Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Learn more. This month, the US Department of Health and Human Services announced that it was canceling 22 contracts and investments worth nearly $500 million as a part of a 'coordinated wind-down' of mRNA vaccine research. Yet some projects that do not involve mRNA or vaccines have been caught up in the purge. At the same time, the administration has quietly endorsed research into mRNA treatments for cancer and genetic disorders. HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long been suspicious of mRNA vaccines, and in May he announced that HHS would no longer recommend mRNA Covid-19 vaccines for healthy children and pregnant women. The same month, he canceled a $590 million contract with Moderna, one of the mRNA Covid vaccine manufacturers, for a bird flu vaccine based on the same technology. In a video on social media, he justified the latest cuts by saying 'HHS has determined that mRNA technology poses more risk than benefits for these respiratory viruses,' which contradicts the scientific evidence. 'The major misconception is that mRNA is some voodoo thing that we are sticking into our body, that it's a magic molecule from Mars,' says Jonathan Kagan, an immunologist at Harvard Medical School and cofounder of Corner Therapeutics, which is developing mRNA treatments for cancer. Short for messenger RNA, mRNA is a molecule found naturally in every cell in the body. It provides instructions to cell machinery to make certain proteins and is used constantly by the body to run and repair itself. Kagan likens mRNA to an app for human health. Scientists have figured out how to make synthetic versions of the molecule that can be programmed to make different kinds of proteins. This tailored mRNA can then be delivered to people to address various diseases. 'The problem with mRNA is that the first clinical application was the most political thing on the planet,' says Kagan, referring to the mRNA Covid vaccines. 'Therefore the disease got muddied in the technology.' Developed and authorized during President Donald Trump's first administration as part of Operation Warp Speed, the mRNA Covid vaccines use the molecule to direct cells to produce copies of the coronavirus spike protein, stimulating the immune system to create defenses against the virus. The shots were instrumental in reducing deaths and hospitalizations during the pandemic, and while they have a very high safety profile, they have been known to cause rare cases of heart inflammation in boys and young men. In June, the US Food and Drug Administration approved new labeling for Moderna's and Pfizer's mRNA Covid vaccines to emphasize this risk. Research into mRNA vaccines had been ongoing for years, and during the pandemic the technology was used because it allowed for faster manufacturing compared to traditional vaccine development methods. The versatility of mRNA led to an explosion of interest in harnessing it against a range of other diseases, both in vaccines and therapeutics. After the success of the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines, the US government invested more heavily in mRNA technology. The canceled contracts announced on August 5 were part of a program under the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), the agency within HHS tasked with developing medical countermeasures against pandemics and other public health threats. Among the projects canceled are some that weren't working with mRNA or on vaccine development. One of the targeted recipients, Tiba Biotech, had a $750,000 contract with BARDA that was slated to end October 30. The company was developing an RNAi-based therapeutic for H1N1 influenza, also known as swine flu. RNAi is short for RNA interference and refers to small pieces of RNA that can shut down the production of specific proteins. The approach has been well studied, and several RNAi-based drugs are on the market. The first was approved in 2018 to treat nerve damage caused by a rare disease called hereditary transthyretin-mediated amyloidosis. The contract cancellation came as a surprise to Tiba, which received a stop-work order on August 5 that did not reference the wind-down of BARDA's mRNA vaccine development activities. 'Our project does not involve the development of an mRNA product and is a therapeutic rather than a vaccine,' said Jasdave Chahal, Tiba's chief scientific officer, via email. Government contracts often include specific milestones that contractors must achieve to receive funding and move forward with their projects. Tiba says its project had met its goals so far and was near completion. Also among the canceled contracts was a $750,000 award to Emory University to convert an mRNA-based antiviral treatment for flu and Covid into an inhaled, dry powder formulation. The project did not involve the development of a vaccine. 'Unfortunately, we don't have much insight to offer on the grant cancellation,' Emory spokesperson Brian Katzowitz told WIRED in an email. The cuts are consistent with Kennedy's desire to deprioritize research into infectious diseases, although experts have warned that the cuts could leave the US more vulnerable to future pandemics. Despite its scaling down of RNA-related infectious disease research, the administration has expressed enthusiasm about some non-Covid research involving mRNA. In January, shortly after taking office, President Trump announced a joint venture by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank called Stargate to invest up to $500 billion for AI infrastructure. At the time, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison talked up the potential for AI to make personalized mRNA-based vaccines for cancer. In an August 12 op-ed in The Washington Post, National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya acknowledged the promise of mRNA. 'I do not dispute its potential. In the future, it may yet deliver breakthroughs in treating diseases such as cancer, and HHS is continuing to invest in ongoing research on applications in oncology and other complex diseases,' he wrote. Unlike his boss, Bhattacharya says he does not believe the mRNA vaccines have caused mass harm. But he says the reason for stopping mRNA vaccine research is because the platform has lost public trust—a rationale that deviates from Kennedy's. Yet mRNA may be more accepted when it comes to treating very sick patients with genetic disorders. Earlier this year, regulators at the FDA greenlit a customized gene-editing treatment for an infant named KJ Muldoon with a rare and life-threatening liver disease. Created in just six months, it uses mRNA to deliver the gene-editing components to his liver. It was the first time a customized gene-editing treatment was used to successfully treat a patient. In June, FDA commissioner Marty Makary praised the achievement on his podcast, calling it 'kind of a big win for medical science,' and at an FDA roundtable Makary said the agency will continue to facilitate the regulatory process for these types of products. The researchers behind the custom gene-editing treatment plan to use the same approach for more patients and recently met with the FDA about a clinical trial proposal. 'The FDA was very positive about the proposal and effectively gave us the green light to proceed with our work,' says Kiran Musunuru, professor for translational research at the University of Pennsylvania and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. The team has another meeting with the FDA in a month or two to discuss extending the platform concept beyond a single disease or single gene to a broader group of disorders. 'We'll see how that goes,' he says.
