These Penn undergrads want to make fracking safer

Five teams are vying for $5,000 and licensing rights in Penn’s Y-Prize Competition, which challenges students to propose creative uses for Penn-built technologies. One team that made the finals wants to use nanomaterial graphene to “detect trace amounts of harmful leaked fracking fluid into groundwater.”
See all the finalists
Winners will be announced Jan. 28. Previous winners include a project to use Penn robots as IED detectors (now a company in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia that uses drones to collect data from hazardous environments) and a low-cost robot to teach students STEM.