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Syaiful Arif

You might think that cow dung smells bad, but that must be because you have never mixed it with coconut water and let it distill for seven days to remove all the impurities. This is what two students competing in Indonesia’s Science Project Olympiad did, and they ended up with a nice-smelling, eco-friendly, chemical-free cow dung air freshener. The high school girls, Dwi Nailul Izzah and Rintya Aprianti Miki, did such a good job that they actually beat out 1,000 other student inventors to win the competition.

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The air freshener has a supposedly herbal aroma. I wish there was some way to use scratch and sniff on the internet — perhaps someone can come up with it and do a big TED Talk about it and then everyone can post it on Facebook and say, “This person inspires me so much and made me smile today.” In the meantime, you’ll just have to smile about smart high school girls turning poop into Glade Plug-Ins.

Izzah and Miki will be competing at the International Environment Project Olympiad in Istanbul. Those girls are going to have a lot of fun there. You can just tell they are ready to let loose.

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