Google Science Fair: Are Girls Smarter Than Boys?

Girls have long argued they are smarter than boys, and three winners at the Google Science Fair have made a good case for that argument. The three top winners of Google's inaugural science fair were all girls.

They emerged from 15 science fair finalists who put their projects on display at Google headquarters.

More than 1,000 people went by the exhibit hall at Google's headquarters to see the 15 displays and meet the finalists, and in the end judges chose three winners -- all girls.

This year was all about girl power, Google said, in a blog post announcing the winners.

The winners were:

--Shree Bose, a high-school student from Fort Worth, Texas (Grand Prize Winner; winner from the 17-18 age group)

--Naomi Shah, from Portland, Oregon (15-16 age group)

--Lauren Hodge (13-14 age group)

Each of the three winners will receive scholarships from Google. Bose, the grand prize winner, receives a $50,000 scholarship, while Shah and Hodge receive $25,000 scholarships.

Bose investigated drug resistance in ovarian cancer for her project. Shah looked at the link between pollutants in the air and respiratory disease, and Hodge tested the effects of different types of marinades on the formation of cancer-causing substances in grilled chicken.

Google's science fair was sponsored in part by Scientific American, a leading popular science magazine.

Our judges said the unifying elements of all three young women were their intellectual curiosity, their tenaciousness and their ambition to use science to find solutions to big problems, Google said.