Every year Intel runs the International Science and Engineering Fair, and as part of that event the chip giant awards high school students prize money for the best science projects.

The winner this year was 19-year-old Ionut Budisteanu for his low cost, self-driving car model. But it’s 18-year-old runner up Eesha Khare that caught our attention. Intel awarded her the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award and a $50,000 scholarship for a tiny device that fits inside a phone battery.

Khare’s invention could potentially have a major impact on smartphones because it holds the promise of 20-30 second battery charges. So no more hooking your phone up to an outlet for a few hours, you just wait no more than 30 seconds for a full battery.

What Khare has designed and created is a supercapacitor with a “special nanostructure” allowing it to store significantly more energy while charging incredibly quickly. It also remains viable for 10,000 charges compared to the more typical 1,000 charges of today’s batteries.

Her experiment used the supercapacitor to power an LED, but both Khare and Intel believe the same tech can be used to similar effect on a smartphone. There’s also potential uses for car batteries, too, which could make electric cars more viable if their recharge time can be cut to a few minutes or even seconds.

For now, Khare will be using the scholarship money to go to college while at the same time continuing to study science and experimenting. Who knows, one day she could be the next Elon Musk, or may actually end up working for him if this supercapacitor tech continues to hold promise.

This just sends too many red flags.

If she did what is being claimed, she should be nominated for a bigger prize than just Intel..that too runner-up. The first prize winner came out with auto-driven auto, using camera. Obviously that has downsides since it didn't use infra-red or other detection technology (what do you do in a foggy day?). But, if what has been claimed was right, she created a better "invention" than anybody else.

Let's dissect it. She hasn't created a super-charger that charges fast. What she did was create a nano super capacitor that can be charged in an instant. This capacitor isn't going to charge your cell phone or car battery in an instant (density/sec would be too high and battery will blow up). So, the alternative would be to use this capacitor directly, or to use it to slowly charge inside the gadget. You would charge the capacitor in an instant and the capacitor will slowly power or charge something else.
Not too bad, but we already found one issue with the article that it's not a super charger.

Now going back to the capacitor. Super capacitor theory is not a new invention. People have been working on it for a while, specially in battery alternative technology. Her super capacitor is very small (nano level) so that's a good thing. The cost to produce these capacitors however are high, but since I don't have a data on this, I will digress. Heard about Graphene? Well it solves the problem of scalability and cost. Works on similar theory and charges batteries fast.

So, given all that, the invention is still not bad right? I don't know...if she did it on her own, I would have said the girl is very deserving. But I doubt a lab assistant produced this on her own. Take a gander at this:
http://research.pbsci.ucsc.edu/chemistry/li/publications/2013_AM_25_267_272.pdf

Same Hi-TiO2 technology but her name isn't even mentioned. Notice the last name of the publisher, YAT LI!!! Who's her mentor? Yat Li. (see her submission: http://www.usc.edu/CSSF//History/2013/Projects/S0912.pdf ).

So do we still think this girl invented this thing?
I don't know about you, but I find it hard to believe it. She probably helped in synthesizing it, but she certainly didn't invent it by her own.

looks where indians are today, and we are still stuck at "budhha was born in Nepal"...

 
Maybe it's just you who's stuck?