Year 8

As a kid, Paige Brown, 17, spent time playing in and around the local streams of Bangor, Maine. She thought they must be pretty clean. After all, she played in them and didn’t get sick. But an experiment in science class at Bangor High School showed that the water might not be as pristine as she had thought. That led Paige to study the streams — and design a filter to remove a serious pollutant in them.