From snowflakes to surfactants: meet the YouTube Space Lab regional winners

At the end of January, we invited you to choose your favorite YouTube Space Lab experiment ideas from sixty finalist teams, and today we have our winners! More than 100,000 of you cast your votes that combined with the scores from our panel of judges to decide the regional winners for the final stage of the competition. Find out who won below and you can meet them all on the Space Lab Channel.

14 - 16 year old regional winning teams

• Asia Pacific region: Is space too cold for life to exist? by Patrick Zeng & Derek Chan from New Zealand
• Europe, Middle East and Africa region: Could weightless liquids be the key to better gadgets? by Laura Calvo & María Vilas from Spain
• The Americas region: Could alien superbugs cure disease on Earth? by Dorothy Chen & Sara Ma from U.S.A.

17 - 18 year old regional winning teams:

• Asia Pacific region: Could liquid magnets take us deeper into space? by Sachin Kukke from India
• Europe, Middle East and Africa region: Can you teach an old spider new tricks? by Amr Mohamed from Egypt
• The Americas region: Could a snowflake unlock the mysteries of the universe? by Emerald Bresnahan from U.S.A

The six regional winning teams will travel to Washington, D.C., where we’ll announce the two global winners (one team from each age group). These two winners will have their experiments performed 250 miles above Earth aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and live streamed on YouTube as part of a global event celebrating science and space. While in Washington, all the teams will take part in a series of activities to honor their achievements, including the opportunity to experience weightlessness on a ZERO-G flight.

Space Lab invited budding scientists to submit a YouTube video describing an idea for an experiment that could be carried out aboard the ISS. The channel, which serves as a launch pad for discovering great space and science videos on YouTube, has received more than 50 million views worldwide throughout the course of the competition. This week we’re uploading interviews with the winners in their hometowns, so subscribe to the channel to keep up to date with all the latest from here on Earth!

Zahaan Bharmal, YouTube Space Lab lead, recently watched the “ESA Education (English)” playlist.