High school seniors missed out on so much in 2023—no proms, no traditional graduation ceremonies. But that has not stopped some of them trying to solve the world’s biggest challenges. And Lillian Kay Petersen from Los Alamos, New Mexico, is among them.

Petersen invented a simple tool for predicting harvests early in the growing season, which could facilitate food allocation(分配) planning and offer useful resources to those working to tackle global food insecurity. She first tested her tool, which analyzed daily satellite imagery using accepted measures of vegetation health, on known domestic crop data. She then carried out experiments for countries in Africa and successfully predicted harvests with high accuracy against reported production.

Petersen won first place and the $250,000 top award in the Regeneron Science Talent Search 2023, one of the oldest and most reputable science and math competitions for high school seniors in the US.

In 2014, Petersen’s family adopted her three younger brothers and sisters, all of whom suffered from malnutrition due to food insecurity in their childhood. Their struggles against the lifelong effects left a deep impression on her. After reading about a disastrous drought in Ethiopia between 2018 and 2019, she put her computer science knowledge to use. “I wanted to find a way to help aid organizations monitor crop condition as droughts evolve, to help them respond to food crises with a better time, and to help children so that they don’t face malnutrition and lifelong consequences,” she said.

While in high school, she began monitoring droughts in Africa using satellite imagery. Later, she published her first paper on the subject in a peer-reviewed journal. She has also met with the International Food Policy Research Institute to discuss the global pandemic and its effects on crop production in Africa.

It’s no secret that non-alcoholic beer tastes much worse than regular beer, but scientists in Denmark now claim to have developed a way of making it taste just as satisfying.

What non-alcoholic beer lacks is the flavor from hops (啤酒花). When you remove the alcohol from the beer, for example by heating it up, you also kill the flavor that comes from hops. Other methods for making alcohol-free beer also lead to poor flavor because alcohol is needed for hops to pass their unique flavor to the beer.

“After years of research, we have found a way to produce monoterpenoids (单萜), which provide the flavor, and then add them to the beer at the end of the process of making beer to give back its lost flavor. No one has been able to do this before, so it’s a game changer for non-alcoholic beer,” the Danish professor added.

This method of artificially recreating the flavor of hops using monoterpenoids is currently being tested in factories producing across Denmark, and the plan is to have a plan ready for the country’s entire beer industry by the end of October.

Although non-alcoholic beer has been growing in popularity at a very rapid pace, the new thing announced by Sotirios Kampranis and his team could have major meaning for the entire beer industry and our environment. Growing hops is a very wasteful process, with one kilogram of hops requiring no less than 2.7 tons of water.

“With our method, we skip hops and the water and the transportation. This means that one kilogram of hops can be produced with more than 10,000 times less water and more than 100 times less CO₂,” Kampranis said. “When the monoterpenoids are released from yeast, we collect them and put them into the beer, giving back the taste of regular beer that so many of us know and love.” he added.

Best smartwatches you can buy right now

1. Apple Watch SE

The Apple Watch SE is the best smartwatch money can buy right now, but it’s only the right choice for you if you own an iPhone. If you do have an iPhone, you may wonder why the Apple Watch 6 doesn’t take our title of the very best smartwatch? That’s because the Apple Watch SE does almost everything that smartwatch can, but for a much lower price.

The Apple Watch SE comes with a high-end design and a great range of features that you can’t get on every other smartwatch right now. The battery life isn’t the best on the market based on our tests, and there isn’t an always-on display, but if you’re after a great value for money choice for your next wrist companion you should opt for the Apple Watch SE.

2. Samsung Galaxy Watch 4

The Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 is a wearable that had a lot of publicity around it. This sees Samsung return to Wear OS, having used Tizen for recent models. But this isn’t Wear OS as you might know it — it’s a new take on the operating system, designed alongside Samsung, and with a very Tizen-like skin on the top.

Add to that great performance, what we found to be a comfortable fit, a lightweight build, and interesting new body composition measurement tools, and this makes for a top smartwatch, especially for those interested in tracking their health and fitness.

But with some of its features requiring a Samsung phone, and no support for iPhones, the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 isn’t something we can recommend to everyone. It also arguably isn’t worth upgrading to if you already own a recent Galaxy Watch.

3. Apple Watch 6

The Apple Watch 6 hasn’t taken the top spot in our best smartwatch list, but this is the absolute best device you can get if you own an iPhone. Why isn’t it ranked above the Apple Watch SE? Because it’s a lot more expensive than that option.

It isn’t a huge upgrade over the Apple Watch 5 though. There are new features like blood oxygen monitoring and an upgraded chipset, but largely it’s a similar device with the exact same screen and design.

That said, if you’re after an Apple Watch this is the best from the company ever, we just found the lack of any major upgrades a slight disappointment.