These Young Innovators Are Totally Inspiring Us To Change The World

Here at MTV Breaks it makes us feel all warm and fuzzy when we see young people achieving things that we could never even have dreamed of when we were wee. So get ready to feel inspired by these young innovators who are crushing it and putting adults everywhere to shame.

Hannah Herbst

When she was just 14-years-old, Hannah Herbst took it upon herself to solve the global energy crisis and won herself America’s Young Scientist Challenge. No biggie. After receiving a letter from her Ethiopian pen pal telling her how they had no electricity, Hannah decided to take matters into her own hands by designing and building a small turbine that converts ocean tides into electricity.  

She also wants other young people to follow in her footsteps, saying, “If you're reading this blog post and are in middle school, I hope that you will apply for the 2016 Discovery Education and 3M Young Scientist Challenge, it is such an amazing opportunity to explore, innovate, and work with a scientist from 3M to develop your prototype. I hope to see YOU posting blogs next year!". Watch her video above explaining the invention- she’s amazing.

Muaz Nawaz, Daanyaal Ali, and Chirag Shah

At 13-14 we’re not sure we even really knew what an STI was, let alone how to stop them spreading. This bunch of young geniuses did though and they didn’t stop there. Nope, they scooped a £1000 prize and a visit to Buckingham Palace for their ingenious invention of a condom that changes colour if you have an STI. It even has a clever name, the S.T.EYE. We wouldn’t be surprised if these are everywhere before long.

Josh Taylor

Josh Taylor has his own farm run totally by renewable energy. Pretty impressive, right? But that’s not all. Josh also runs an Entrepreneurs Retreat from the farm which educates, among others, FTSE 100 companies on how to be more environmental in their business. Josh is teaching the biggest businesses in the world how to improve, and he’s only 24.

Lilianna Zyszkowski

At age 11 Lilianna Zyszkowski’s grandfather accidentally overdosed on his blood thinning medication and ended up in hospital. Rattled by the incident, Lilianna decided to make sure nothing like that would ever happen again. She invented PillMinder, a system of sensors attached to pill-storage bottles to notify either the person taking the pills or someone responsible for them that they’ve taken (or not taken) their pill via SMS or a private Twitter account. She has since further developed her idea to be affixed to pill bottles to help monitor addiction to pills as well as coming up with tons of other great ideas and she’s even started her own company and won the Smithsonian Ingenuity Awards.

Peyton Robertson

Peyton Robertson’s hometown of Fort Washington regularly floods and he wasn’t happy about it, so he decided to help out. He invented a unique new kind of sandbag that’s lightweight and easy to move around when dry but becomes dense when wet. His idea won him $25,000 at the Young Scientist Awards, an adorable spot on Ellen and he now has several more patents pending for more ingenious inventions. He’s 12, by the way…

Jack Andraka

Jack Andraka is semi-famous in his high school, and rightly so. Jack won the grand prize ($75,000) at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for his work in developing a a promising early detection test for pancreatic cancer that’s super cheap, effective and non-invasive, all before he turned 16. Check out his inspirational TED Talk on achieving success from a young age: 

Guled Adan Abdi

13-year-old Guled Adan Abdi has never had access to regular education but from a young age loved building things, so he took matters into his own hands. He started with building toy planes and cars from scraps of plastic he found around his city – Buuhoodle, Somalia. Not satisfied with this, he began looking into how real cars work and dedicated hours every day to building miniature working versions from scraps. His efforts have now been recognised by the Somalian government who have offered to pay for his future education to see what a bright spark he could become.

This lot show that no matter how young you are, if you’ve got a good idea there’s no telling where it could take you. Have you got any genius ideas locked away in your brain? We’d love to hear them over at @MTVBreaks! 

- Henry Boon