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CNN Live Sunday

A Meeting of Minds in San Jose

Aired May 13, 2001 - 20:21   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
STEPHEN FRAZIER, CNN ANCHOR: Entrepreneurs are often told to build a better mouse trap, but the student inventors we're going to introduce to you now have developed some far more interesting devices, such as a glove that helps deaf people order fast food.

Here's CNN's Rusty Dornin.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

RUSTY DORNIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): You might call it the sons and daughters of invention convention. From 43 countries, 1,200 scientific creations of the next generation.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This device will make rocket fuel on Mars.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We have made a super computer from the Internet.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I designed a (UNINTELLIGIBLE) to help reduce the causes of pressure sores.

DORNIN: The Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in San Jose, California. Out of one million competitors worldwide, the best and brightest. Sixteen-year-old Ryan Patterson saw deaf customers in a fast food restaurant forced to use human translators to order food. He came up with a glove that sends electronic signals to translate American sign language.

RYAN PATTERSON, INVENTOR: This is the circuit board that waits for your hand to stabilize, which means that it needs to translate that sign.

DORNIN: You can't get more spaced out than 15-year-old David Hagen's (ph) design; taking the Martian atmosphere and turning it into rocket fuel for a space vehicle to return to Earth.

But who says brilliant discoveries have to be about the future? John Curtis says he knows why some Civil War soldiers were documented with wounds that glowed.

JOHN CURTIS, HISTORICAL INVESTIGATOR: The reason why these wounds glowed and why the soldiers had a better survival rate was because of a bacteria, Photorhabdus Luminescens.

DORNIN: From this pair of Russians, another concept in parallel processing...

ALEX KOMAROV, MOSCOW INVENTOR: Now, you just go to our site, you turn off your monitor and we'll use the power of your processor.

DORNIN: ... to these Irishmen who claim they can help a local poultry factory.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You have to put this inside the bird, like that, in the oven. And that will take the temperature inside the bird.

DORNIN: Inventions already attracting more than a blue ribbon...

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I've filed for a patent and I've been able to present it to a company based out of Tulsa.

DORNIN: ... all competing for $3 million in scholarships and awards. Many of their peers are fascinated by their accomplishments, but...

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Some of them are actually kind of hard to understand.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yeah, I don't really understand most of these projects.

DORNIN: Brilliance left for the judges to understand.

Rusty Dornin, CNN, San Jose, California.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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