Ciara Judge, Emer Hickey and Sophie Healy-Thow are there teenagers from Kinsale Community College who have just won the top prize at the Google science Fair. Their winning project found that a type of naturally-occurring bacteria could be used to increase the germination speed of barley and oats by 50%. This finding could have a massive effect on crop production in the third world.

The level of work has been mind-boggling. The girls built their own lab in one of their spare rooms. They designed their own bio-reactor plus an incubator and they also went to UCC to train to make sure the samples they were using would be correct.

Here are the girls explaining their project

You can hear an interview with the victorious Cork threesome this Saturday from 10am.