Those bright young students
The image I chose to illustrate this post if from Miss Joana Meneguzzo Pasqualli, who received the Jovem Cientista (Young Scientist) award from the Brazilian National Research, Development and Innovation Council (CNPq) in the category "Ensino Médio" (equivalent to the American High School and the German Gymnasium). As I learned from her achievement this morning I decided to write this homage to all these idealistic young students, who still have that spark of curiosity which moves Mankind forward.
To understand why she was awarded, I have to mention some of my far less honorable countrymen. Some years ago a fraud was discovered among the milk distributors in southern Brazil, they added chemicals (like formaldehyde or sodium hydroxide) to the raw milk for profit. This caused outrage in the country, and this affected the young girl. She decided to act. As she told, this was not easy and she had to learn a lot. Her school teachers helped her, and they must be praised too, because it is quite easy to kill this kind of endeavor, you only need to dismiss it as childish or even "too difficult".
She developed a simple tester, a band of paper, with some chemical markers for the most common fraud "additions" to milk. I have no information on the specifics, but I saw her interview in the television, so I got some of her main ideas, she made her detector from a conventional paper filter, one of those used to pour coffee, so people could have it in their own homes and do the tests themselves. A quite honorable social cause.
As I saw this I was thinking how nice it would be to have one of those students (I have many students like her, I'm just saying this figuratively) in my classroom, then I discovered she is enrolled in the first semester of the materials engineering course of the University of Caxias do Sul. I am pleased to discover this, not only because I teach in a Materials Engineering course, but because this is the right engineering course for students who have her profile. I wish she maintains alive this innovation spirit.