It was the largest contiguous land empire in history— stretching from Korea to Ukraine and from Siberia to southern China, and was forged on the open plains.
In the 12th century CE, before the Mongol Empire formed, the East Asian steppe was home to scattered groups of Mongol and Turkic pastoral nomads led by Khans.
The people herded sheep, cattle, yaks and camels.
They lived in felt tents and moved between summer and winter campsites.
Nomadic women held significant authority, managing these migrations, many of the flocks and trade.
Meanwhile, men specialized in mounted warfare.
These nomadic groups often fought each other.
That was to change under Temujin, who was born into an aristocratic Mongol family.
Despite losing his father at an early age and growing up in poverty, he quickly rose to power by forging strategic alliances with other leaders.
Unlike those khans, Temujin promoted soldiers based on merit and distributed spoils evenly among them.
His most brilliant move was to scatter the nomads he conquered among his own soldiers so they couldn't join together against him.
These innovations made him unstoppable, and by 1206, he had united the people of the felt-walled tents and become Chinggis Khan.
The Mongols were shamanists, believing that the spirits of nature and their ancestors inhabited the world around them.
Over all arched the Sky god Tenggeri.
Chinggis Khan believed that Tenggeri wanted him to conquer the entire world in his name.
With the nomads of the Mongolian plain united, this seemed within reach.
Anyone who resisted the Mongols was resisting Tenggeri's will, and for this insubordination, had to die.
Under Chinggis Khan, the Mongols first subdued northern China and the eastern Islamic lands.
After his death in 1227, the Divine Mandate passed to his family, or the Golden Lineage.
In the 1230s, Chinggis Khan's sons and daughters conquered the Turks of Central Asia and the Russian princes, then destroyed two European armies in 1241.
In the 1250s, the Mongols seized Islamic territory as far as Baghdad, while in the East their grasp reached southern China by 1279.
Life within the Mongol Empire wasn't just war, pillage and destruction.
Once the Mongols conquered a territory, they left its internal politics alone and used local administrators to govern for them.
The Mongols let all religions flourish, as long as the leaders prayed for them.
Although they routinely captured artisans, scholars and engineers, they appreciated what those specialists could do and forcibly settled them across Asia to continue their work.
The most valuable produce in the Empire was gold brocade, which took silk from China, gold from Tibet and weavers from Baghdad.
Gold brocade clothed the Mongol rulers, covered their horses and lined their tents.
The Mongols particularly prized gunpowder technicians from China.
With much of Eurasia politically unified, trade flourished along the Silk Road, helped by an extensive system of horse messengers and relay posts.
Robust trade continued at sea, especially in blue-and-white porcelain, which combined white pottery from Mongol China with blue dye from Mongol Iran.
But this was not to last.
Succession to the Great Khan didn't automatically go to the eldest son, but rather allowed brothers, uncles and cousins to vie for leadership with senior widows acting as regents for their sons.
By the 1260s, Chinggis Khan's grandsons were in a full- blown civil war over inheritance and fragmented the realm into four separate empires.
In China, Kublai Khan's Yuan Dynasty is remembered as a golden age of science and culture.
In Iran, the Ilkhanate inaugurated the development of new monumental architecture and Persian miniature painting.
In Central Asia, the Chagatai Khanate brought forth leaders like Timur and his descendant Babur, who founded the Mughal Empire in India.
And in Eastern Europe, the Golden Horde ruled for years until a trading post named Muscovy grew into a major world power.
Even though the Empire lasted only a short while, the Mongols left a legacy of world- domination that remains unmatched today.
It was just an ordinary Saturday.
My dad was outside mowing the lawn, my mom was upstairs folding laundry, my sister was in her room doing homework and I was in the basement playing video games.
And as I came upstairs to get something to drink, I looked out the window and realized that there was something that I was supposed to be doing, and this is what I saw.
No, this wasn't my family's dinner on fire.
This was my science project.
Flames were pouring out, smoke was in the air and it looked like our wooden deck was about to catch fire.
I immediately started yelling.
My mom was freaking out, my dad ran around to put out the fire and of course my sister started recording a Snapchat video.
(Laughter) This was just the beginning of my team's science project.
My team is composed of me and three other students who are here in the audience today.
We competed in FIRST LEGO League which is an international LEGO robotics competition for kids, and in addition to a robotics game, we also worked on a separate science project, and this was the project that we were working on.
So the idea for this project all started when a few months earlier, a couple of my teammates took a trip to Central America and saw beaches littered with Styrofoam, or expanded polystyrene foam.
And when they came back and told us about it, we really started thinking about the ways in which we see Styrofoam every day.
Get a new flat-screen TV?
You end up with a block of Styrofoam bigger than the TV itself.
Drink a cup of coffee?
Well, those Styrofoam coffee cups are sure going to add up.
And where do all these items go after their one-time use?
Since there aren't any good existing solutions for used Styrofoam, almost all of them end up right in the landfill, or the oceans and beaches, taking over 500 years to degrade.
And in fact, every year, the US alone produces over two billion pounds of Styrofoam, filling up a staggering 25 percent of landfills.
So why do we have these ghost accumulations of Styrofoam waste?
Why can't we just recycle them like many plastics?
Well, simply put, recycled polystyrene is too expensive and potentially contaminated, so there is very little market demand for Styrofoam that has to be recycled.
And as a result, Styrofoam is considered a nonrenewable material, because it is neither feasible nor viable to recycle polystyrene.
And in fact, many cities across the US have even passed ordinances that simply ban the production of many products containing polystyrene, which includes disposable utensils, packing peanuts, takeout containers and even plastic beach toys, all products that are very useful in today's society.
And now France has become the first country to completely ban all plastic utensils, cups and plates.
But what if we could keep using Styrofoam and keep benefiting from its cheap, lightweight, insulating and excellent packing ability, while not having to suffer from the repercussions of having to dispose of it?
What if we could turn it into something else that's actually useful?
What if we could make the impossible possible?
My team hypothesized that we could use the carbon that's already in Styrofoam to create activated carbon, which is used in almost every water filter today.
And activated carbon works by using very small micropores to filter out contaminants from water or even air.
So we started out by doing a variety of heating tests, and unfortunately, we had many failures.
Literally, nothing worked.
Besides my dad's grill catching on fire, most of our samples vaporized into nothing, or exploded inside expensive furnaces, leaving a horribly sticky mess.
In fact, we were so saddened by our failures that we almost gave up.
So why did we keep trying when all the adults said it was impossible?
Well, maybe it's because we're kids.
We don't know any better.
But the truth is, we kept trying because we thought it was still possible.
We knew that if we were successful, we would be helping the environment and making the world a better place.
So we kept trying and failing and trying and failing.
We were so ready to give up.
But then it happened.
With the right temperatures, times and chemicals, we finally got that successful test result showing us that we had created activated carbon from Styrofoam waste.
And at that moment, the thing that had been impossible all of a sudden wasn't.
It showed us that although we had many failures at the beginning, we were able to persevere through them to get the test results that we wanted.
And moreover, not only were we able to create activated carbon for purifying water, but we were also able to reduce Styrofoam waste, solving two global problems with just one solution.
So from then on, we were inspired to take our project further, performing more tests to make it more effective and testing it in real world situations.
We then proceeded to receive funding from the NSTA's eCYBERMISSION STEM-in-Action program sponsored by the US Army, as well as FIRST Global Innovation Awards sponsored by XPRIZE.
And we were also honored with the Scientific American Innovator Award from Google Science Fair.
And using these funds, we plan to file a full patent on our process and to continue to work on our project.
So yes, although we started with catching my dad's grill on fire and failing so many times that we almost quit, it was well worth it when we look back at it now.
We took a problem that many people said was impossible and we made it possible, and we persevered when it looked like nothing that we did would work.
We learned that you can't have success without a little, or a lot, of failure.
So in the future, don't be afraid if your grill goes up in flames, because you never know when your idea might just catch fire.
Thank you.
(Applause)