I've always kinda been interested in bacteria.
High school senior Critty Lawl turned that passion for bacteria into a potentially award-winning Intel Science Fair project.
I made a novel water treatment system to inexpensively remove arsenic from water.
This novel system uses a bacteria that I genetically engineered.
And it also uses a ["bio-reactor/g"] that I designed and built.
Her system costs around $8 to build from basic supplies.
She hopes to help the 137 million people affected by arsenic polluted water.
The main component is the bacteria in the jar which does the real magic which is converting.
The Arsenite to the Arsenate.
She is one of 40 finalists from the nearly 2000 competitors in Intel Science Talent Search this year.
Finalist projects range from cyber security to detecting parasites in blood samples.
A project created by 18 year old Tanay Tandon.
Take the slide put it underneath the smart phone and the lens attachment and you know take a picture on the camera.
Send it to server, the server analyzes it and within a couple of seconds you get an output with sort of a preliminary blood report.
Tandon says the report can detect blood disorders like sickle cell anemia and the presence of parasites indicating a tropical disease like malaria or Chavez.
The tricky part was teaching the computer to make a diagnosis.
We train the machine learning algorithms in order to identify the different types of parasites.
Which he did by showing it images of parasites and blood cells.
Whether Tandon and Lull win the top prize or not, both students hope their projects will end up saving lives.
In San Francisco, I'm Kara Tsuboi, CNET.com for CBS News.
