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Informative Speech: Made Water On Mars

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Combining oxygen with hydrogen extracted from hydrazine is how Mark Watney, in the movie “The Martian,” made water on Mars. We are going to need Watneys on earth too. 97% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, but 96% of that is saline. And it gets worse. 3.4 million people die every year due to waterborne diseases. Water purification is a grand challenge today and is at the same scale as global warming and depletion of nonrenewable natural resources. I want to address this challenge. As a kid, out of curiosity, I used to study the ingredients in household chemicals. A lot of dangerous substances had very useful applications. Chlorine, for example, is both a poison to humans and the thing that makes pools swimmable. This kind of paradox about common household chemicals and what they do to water is what led me to take rigorous science courses in high school, where I nurtured my passion for chemistry, as well as biology, and physics. I participated in chemistry league competitions and Olympiads as a way to build my knowledge piece by piece, like building lego. I studied atomic structure, covalent bonds and ionization energy asking myself: Why? How do molecules stick to each other? When would it be advantageous to unstick them? …show more content…

This further led me, in my junior summer, to a mentorship program with Professor Jaehong Kim at Yale, during which I learned about various materials used for sustainable water treatment, such as fullerenes, carbon nanotubes, and nano-sized membranes. By the end of the summer, I was able to design my own “super-nanomaterial.” but I would have to wait until college to synthesize

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