As others have mentioned it's not the first time.
So, is the reporter willfully lying, or is so incompetent that couldn't even do a simple Google search? I don't know which is worse.
https://i.4cdn.org/b/1789145070031855.mp4 (completely SFW)
(links to 4chan expire in a day or so, so if anybody has a better link for this, future generations will be able to see it too)
DARPA worked on it 10+ years ago.
But granted, I have trouble seeing this work on a large scale without much more sophisticated sonic wave tech.
Just simply: it is great that young people, driven by personal curiosity, go and explore their ideas, find solutions to long-standing challenges.
Billiant, keep inventing!
"Power a light with a lifted rock": Actually does work and you can buy this product, but it's a dimmer light for less time than the inevitable marketing diagrams indicate. Not useless but the fawning news stories over the science fair prodigy always makes this sound like an unbelievably brilliant solution rather than a rather niche hack even in the poor rural parts of the world. In the 2020s a standard solar panel, battery, and LED light are much better in every way and far more flexible.
"Provide power for a poor rural village from a kicked soccer ball": An absurdly tiny amount of power, at the cost of creating a soccer ball that is soft and doesn't move when you kick it very much, precisely because it's extracting energy from the kick and that energy isn't available to be kinetic energy. No child would ever play with this ball. Have still seen this idea at least three times now despite the fact that if the reporter spent 15 seconds with the actual ball they'd realize it's a complete non-starter.
"Science project demonstrates new way to kill $PATHOGEN": It turns out killing things in a petri dish is really easy. It means nothing about human health outcomes in a body. In fact pretty much anything about a pathogen in a petri dish - improving resistance to something, destroying resistance to something... it's really easy to do lots of things in a petri dish.
"Water from the air": Doesn't work in practice because the place this needs to be deployed to is precisely the place that doesn't have water in the air. It does work in places that have water in the air but those places also don't need super expensive condensed water when they have water already. I personally live in a place where humidity is basically 90-100% every day in spring, summer, and fall. We don't carefully capture our dehumidifier's water.
These are all things I've seen multiple times each.
No child would use it, but those would be really awesome in my Muay-Thai classes.
""Water from the air": Doesn't work in practice because the place this needs to be deployed to is precisely the place that doesn't have water in the air."
There is literally no place on earth where the relative humidity is that low outside the Antarctic dry valleys. Even in the Mojave Desert here, I have a water from air condenser out atop a miner's hotel blasted into rock. I even posted the GPS coordinates to it here on HN. It works great, and produces enough clean water daily for several people. It does need a recharge on the carbonate rock and charcoal, though.
No. Not possible. Not even going to do the math. Dumb. Somewhat more wind-resistant... unless you add up the support structure weight AND the loss of efficiency when the "leaves" are wind-deflected.
But "Green!", so it got attention.
Why do we live in stone age and work on slop machines instead?
https://www.infobae.com/mexico/2026/08/27/se-puede-apagar-el...
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/physicsgifs/comments/5omaxc/oil_wel...
...meanwhile, some folks at George Mason University were doing this back in 2015[1]:
> The fire extinguisher uses low-frequency sound waves to douse a blaze. Engineering seniors Viet Tran and Seth Robertson now hold a preliminary patent application for their potentially revolutionizing device.
That said, it's a solid student project. I'm sure she'll do well at university.
[1]: https://www.ifsecglobal.com/uncategorized/soundwaves-a-new-p...
[2]: https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/FOID/Reading%20...
> Verify you are human
Does anyone else command + w on first sight of a cloudflare screen?
Hate to be a downer, but this has been done before.
No, I dont think I will. closes website
Cloudflare at the forefront of gatekeeping everything on the website
Like... nobody cared, until the guy mentions it. And then he replies back "no I don't care she's Mexican, why do you bring their origin!!!"
FWIW I saw these news in my local news Spanish language sources (yep, Im Mexican too) a couple of days ago. And found the majority of the reporting at that time was exactly a "cool science project" thing.
When I saw it here on HN I was surprised. I even thought like "wow, maybe I didn't put a lot of attention, and it's something bigger". But apparently it's just sloppy reporting, in a telephone-game kind of thing: Some Chilean news saw the headline, and decided to report it as "Mexican 16yo invents X", which draws clicks. Then English based news took it and further deformed the actual facts.
Hopefully this kid gets invited to some podcasts or whatnot and gets something from this. Also hopefully it helps other kids get more interested in sciency projects.
I wasn't implying anything, just wondering why it needs to be in the title.
This technique has been known about since at least 2012 when DARPA did a demonstration of it. There's a reason it hasn't really gone anywhere and mostly exists as science fair demos and Youtube videos now, it's quite limited.
Is that really what happens? Wouldn't the fire be surrounded by the same air?
i remember a girl inventing what i now know to be a "flexible weighted dip tube" – think of it as a shampoo bottle that you can pump upside down – and was amazed.
like this submission, the flexible straw wasn't really invented by the student. at best it was independently discovered, but this patent was from at least twenty five years before: https://patents.google.com/patent/US3547296A/en
to that end, i wonder what the point of presenting these inventions as your own are – especially in the time of the internet when prior art is so easily discovered. or, did i miss the point?
Because if you independently invented it then it is your own.
The value to the student is not necessarily that the idea is novel to everyone else but that is novel to her. And of course the process of invention and development is something that many people never experience, and is valuable in itself.
Praising kids for achievements is a net positive. They use it to focus their energy into future growth and development.
The article is science-reporting trash, of course, but praising the kid is a good thing.
Regardless, nobody involved is honest, and I suspect the honest ones were told the be quiet.
I don't blame the kid though. Looks like they did a great job on it!
Subwoofers can definitely harm human ears, but definitely not human flesh. Just don't put your ear up to it.
[1] https://cadencesound.com/product/tube12vp/?srsltid=AfmBOoqdE...
Depending on what they have going, it might be loud, might not.
As a general rule, cooling any situation involves throwing cold stuff at the hot stuff. We have many means of projecting heat, but no way to project 'cold' without throwing cold stuff.
In practice, the cooling factor is important, but the momentary extinguishment of active flame limits the spread - especially when there is more fuel above.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGO7Jdfll7c
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoacoustic_heat_engine
But if you watch a number of his videos it becomes clear that this is clarity that comes from deep knowledge and sophistication. His channel is also in my opinion notable for having a huge variety of demonstrations, rather than the standard set that is done by a lot of people. There are many things that I've seen only him do, out of my set of science and engineering channels. Which is not to say I know for sure that he is for sure the only one who does them, but it's definitely a more-diverse-than-average set of demonstrations done over the years.
It also, on a more brute level, simply predates AI by a number of years and therefore can't be just an AI script, nor do I see any reason to believe he has switched to using AI to write the scripts.
Many consider his crowning achievement to be his central role in containing the Kuwaiti oil field fires of 1991 that threatened planetary environmental consequences as well as incalculable lost revenues for oil producers. Following a scorched earth retreat policy, Saddam Hussein's defeated army set ablaze more than 700 of Kuwait's 1,000 oil wells. Adair was among the first responders, and his team squelched fires at 117 of the nation's most productive wells.
also, he doesn't understand how a bass reflex speaker works. unlike what he said, the port actually decreases the efficiency of the speaker by letting the negative bass note sine waves cancel out the positive sine waves from the front of the speaker, but this is done to tone down the "boominess" of the speaker at its resonant frequency, thus making the speaker more "neutral" sounding, and it's achieved by having the dimensions of the box and the port finely tuned to work most "efficiently" at the resonant frequency.
but in any case, what he says about the "bulk" movement of air (he should probably call it net, i mean all air is bulk by nature) there is no way that the speaker pumping air in and out of the cavity could turn into net movement in one direction. (the smoke ring blower is slowly charged up in one direction, then released in something like an impulse function but loudspeakers don't have that nature) if what he is seeing with his fan-probe is correct, that should have impressed him more and distracted him into studying what exactly was going on (ex: the air coming out was directionally focused from the cone? and sucking back in was amorphous and somehow not detected by his device?) because it is looking for explanation.
> he called oxygen the fuel for the fire... it's not the fuel for the fire
I think you're correct here, from chemistry definitions oxygen is not fuel, because breaking its bond consumes energy rather than releasing it. However, I don't think the host is trying to give perfectly precise chemistry definitions here, he's trying to explain how fire burns, and calling oxygen 'fuel' makes it clear to his audience that oxygen is required for combustion. I think your objection here is similar to objecting that voters in the US elect electors rather than candidates -- it's correct, but not necessary if you're explaining the concept of democracy.
> the port actually decreases the efficiency of the speaker by letting the negative bass note sine waves cancel out the positive sine waves from the front of the speaker, but this is done to tone down the "boominess" of the speaker at its resonant frequency, thus making the speaker more "neutral" sounding
I don't know much about bass reflex speakers, but I read the wikipedia page in decent depth, and it appears to me that you are wrong, or perhaps using a different definition than the field itself uses. From the wiki page: "This port enables the sound from the rear side of the diaphragm to increase the efficiency of the system at low frequencies as compared to a typical sealed- or closed-box loudspeaker or an infinite baffle mounting... Depending on the exact relationship between driver parameters, the enclosure volume (and filling if any), and the tube cross-section and length, the efficiency can be substantially improved over the performance of a similarly sized sealed-box enclosure." [0]. I bet I can see where your disagreement comes from though -- I think you're arguing that adding the reflex speaker cancels some of the power going through the main speaker, and therefore must result in decreased total_power_out/total_power_in (forgive me if I misunderstand). This is a sensible way to define efficiency, and I think you're correct that total_power_out is strictly decreased. However, there are also other sensible ways to define efficiency, eg, instead of total_power_out you might care about the perceptually-weakest frequency the speaker generates, to ensure the sound is "balanced" to a human ear. You might then define efficiency as num_spectral_bins*min_weighted_spectral_power_out/total_power_in. I have some experience optimizing perceived smoothness, and we used a metric very similar to this. Without fully knowing what you mean or what he means, I think you're disagreeing over terms, not correctness.
> but in any case, what he says about the "bulk" movement of air (he should probably call it net, i mean all air is bulk by nature) there is no way that the speaker pumping air in and out of the cavity could turn into net movement in one direction... the air coming out was directionally focused from the cone? and sucking back in was amorphous and somehow not detected by his device?
I think you're agreeing with him here, his explanation matches yours. We can break a full period of oscillation into two sections: a high pressure section (the air molecules being pushed away from the speaker), and a low pressure section (air being pulled back). The high pressure section travels _coherently_ through the air cannon, mostly moving air molecules in a single direction (as you say, it is "directionally focused from the cone"). The low pressure segment pulls air back into the air cannon, but it is _not_ coherent (as you say, it is "amorphous"). During the low section, molecules can flow towards the air cannon from the side of the cannon; they do not have to come from directly in front of the air cannon. If you rewatch that section I think you'll see you're not disagreeing with him. To be fair, more drawings would help communicate it more clearly. You're correct that if you draw your observation box big enough, there can be no net movement from something wiggling back and forth, but I think he's drawing his observation box over the fire. If you look at that system (the air above the fire), you will see net movement.
I know the field of loudspeakers/acoustics very well, what I've said so far and will say now is all off the top of my head, and it's unlikely that it's in his head at all. We're not going to research a number like 5% more efficient because that's a complete waste of time, let me explain. "We" measure loudness of sound on a decibel scale, that is tenths of a Bel, and the Bel scale is a logarithmic scale, more or less because that's how human hearing perception works, I guess because that's how sounds occur in nature (evolution). But what that all translates to is, to be perceived as "twice as loud" requires a 10 decibel increase; that corresponds to an increase of 10 times the power. On a smaller scale, a 3 dB increase requires doubling power. 3dB is perceptible, but minimally so. So for a tiny 3db increase in loudness requiring 2x the power, is anybody interested in an 5% inefficiency increase taking us to needing 2.1? no, nobody is interested in that, they don't make power amplifiers with ".05 times more power!"
(maybe I should add, the decibel scale is a comparative scale, not an absolute scale, and the hearing/sound phenomenon is not linear to begin with, so it works best and most intuitively on smaller ranges; to put it a different way, a power amplifer can go from zero (off) to 10 Watts, 100 Watts, 1000 Watts, but there is no "log of 0")
now, as to the comparison of tuned ported/bass reflex compared to acoustic suspension (which is what sealed box refers to): acoustic suspension is NOTORIOUSLY ineffient; it is also notoriously good sounding, and in a compact amount of space like an apartment living room the inefficient power is not important to achieving high sound volumes to create a symphony listening experience.
But that is not true of infinite baffles (consider a speaker mounted in a wall), so to lump together infinite baffle with acoustic suspension and call something else 5% more efficient is just plain wrong, but who cares because 5% is nothing on a logarithmic scale.
(space efficiency btw is very important in most people's living spaces, and that's where acoustic suspension really wins. I don't know the "efficiency" of acoustic suspension, but people did need to upgrade their power amplifiers, say from 3 watts to 10 watts or to 20. This was in a period of time where electronics were still transistorizing and shrinking so people would notice "hey, I need to buy something, can't keep using the old thing" more than %ages)
the goal is not efficiency, it's good sound. bass reflex improves its sound by cancelling the resonant frequency which would be overly loud otherwise. acoustic suspension also tames the resonance, but with an entirely different method, the speaker box is small enough that the compression of the air acts as a spring, where the entire surface of the (paper) cone is supported by the sealed air cushion; the acoustic supsension loudspeaker driver itself does not need a spring in that setup, but it is required for other applications of loudspeakers.
he didn't ask himself any questions about the difference between the air cannon and his bass reflex port plus air cannon setup. The frequency of of audio, even very low bass notes would be minimum 20 Hz (that is unrealistically low for most sound systems), and the normal air cannon "balloon snap" is not really comparable. A test he could do would be to keep the speaker cavity filled with smoke and see if a 20 Hz signal blows 20 smoke rings a second: guarantee, it does not, but it might do something interesting. the relatively slow swirl of the smoke ring is a turbulence after effect phenomenon
but lets go back to why I wrote my original comment. incels here were making fun of a mexican high school girl and using that video to point out she had accomplished nothing. so to give her the same credit every high school student deserves for their science fair project, I thought I'd point out that this youtube genius could also be made fun of.