First Prize: Consumer Products
Superstraw

Removing heavy metals such as lead and mercury as well as viruses, bacteria, and plain-old bad tastes, this inexpensive filter fits into a standard water bottle.

Designed with nanotech filtering material by Jim Jablonsky of Pennsylvania, the prototype bottle insert pictured above could make safe drinking water readily available to those with none.

"It can purify many different water streams from almost all Third World sources," said Jablonsky in his entry for the Create the Future contest, whose winners were announced March 10, 2009.

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