Bay Area high schoolers are spending their summers building hardware, coding safety tools, and developing engineering projects — some for national competitions — through school programs and youth-led initiatives that foster real-world innovation.

KPIX in particular has been highlighting many of these stories. In Concord, students at Ygnacio Valley High developed a phone-controlled exoskeleton hand to assist people with limited mobility. The invention earned their team the top honor at MIT’s EurekaFest and is now patent pending. Their teacher, Joseph Alvarico, helped secure a Lemelson-MIT grant, and a local law firm offered pro bono help to file the patent.

San Francisco hosted 180 teen coders from around the world over the weekend at Hack Club’s Undercity event — a four-day overnight build-a-thon where participants created hardware projects from scratch. Sixteen-year-old Meghana Madiraju led tutorials and pushed for greater gender equity in tech. “Getting more girls into tech” is her personal mission, she said, pointing out the gender gap even at forward-thinking events like this one.

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And 18-year-old Mizan Rupan-Tompkins, a licensed pilot with a background in AI, developed an autonomous tool called Stratus to help prevent mid-air collisions at non-towered airports. The system uses machine learning to detect unusual pilot communications in real time for use as a safety net, as opposed to a replacement for air traffic controllers. He hopes to launch it at 10 Bay Area airports within the month.

Meanwhile in Mountain View, as KGO reports, students with Garage 803 Racing are racing the clock to finish their solar-powered car before heading to the Solar Car Challenge at Texas Motor Speedway. They’ve been building everything by hand — sometimes with scavenged parts — and learning on the fly. Their goal is to get to the track, pass tech inspection, and compete against the best student teams in the country.

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The fallout from OceanGateGate continues.

Liz Taylor, a Bay Area deep sea engineer, told the Chronicle that she had advised OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush years ago against using carbon fiber in the ill-fated Titan submersible, which ultimately imploded and resulted in the tragic loss of five lives during its journey to the Titanic.

Taylor, president of Alameda-based marine technology company Doer Marine, who has extensive experience in building advanced submersibles, had a “long conversation” with Rush about his plans to build the submersible, she said in an interview with the Chronicle. She warned him against using relatively light carbon-fiber materials which can’t stand up against the compression that happens in a deep-sea environment.

Rush, who reportedly grew up in San Francisco, perished in the Titan submersible’s implosion, along with four others. The submersible was descending to explore the Titanic shipwreck, which is located 900 miles east of Cape Cod and about 13,000 feet below sea level, as CNN reported. It lost contact last Sunday and people were concerned about the amount of oxygen aboard for the next two days — but the submersible had already suffered a “catastrophic implosion” that killed everyone on board, U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger said Thursday. Confirmation of the incident came when a remotely operated vehicle discovered the tail cone of the Titan, located approximately 1,600 feet away from the bow of the shipwreck.

Taylor reportedly called Rush a "charismatic" "marketing genius" who was "able to convince people that he knew what he was doing." He built the submersible despite being aware of the criticisms. In a 2021 interview with a Spanish video blogger, Rush acknowledged rules against combining carbon fiber and titanium, but said, "Well, I did. It's choosing the rules to break that can bring value to others and society, and that, to me, embodies innovation."

The individuals who tragically lost their lives on the Titan submersible include Rush,  French maritime expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, British businessman and explorer Hamish Harding, and British father and teenage son from a prominent Pakistani family, Shahzada Dawood and Suleman Dawood respectively.

Image of OceanGate submersible via Wikimedia/Isabeljohnson25.

Today the Golden Gate Bridge celebrates 75 years as beacon of engineering precision, aesthetics, and yes, suicide. On average, one person jumps to their death from the bridge every two weeks, "more than 1,500 to date," reports The Telegraph, with only one in 50 jumpers surviving the "four-second plunge." The remarkable yet painful to watch 2006 documentary The Bridge (which we strongly recommend) basically consists one year's filming of the Golden Gate Bridge in 2004, showing (in graphic detail) a number of suicides captured on film. While many have argued for suicide barriers, they have yet to be installed.

On a lighter note, the Golden Gate Bridge is a marvel to behold. However did they pick orange as the bridge's signature color, you ask? According to Reuters, it started out as a primer for an ghastly color scheme.

"Even the bridge's arresting dark orange color was an accident, first used as a primer while designers decided what to paint it. The Navy had argued for black with yellow stripes, to ensure it could be seen in a strait hostile to mariners, with dense fog, heavy winds and strong ocean swells. In the end, bridge authorities decided they liked the color - known as International Orange - and stuck with it."

As for revelry, an estimated tens of thousands will celebrate the Golden Gate Bridge 75th anniversary today, featuring festivities taking place in several locations near the bridge, including live music and entertainment, an art exhibition, a sustainability demo, and a vintage boat display. The event will climax in a massive fireworks that will highlight the bridge. (The bridge will be closed from 9 to 10 p.m. for the show.)