Meet Nathan Gael Montelongo, the La Joya, Texas seventh-grader who turned restaurant shellfish shells into chitosan, improved polluted Rio Grande water and designed a self-dosing cleanup raft

• Nathan Gael Montelongo became interested in the problem after a local fisherman warned him that recent fish catches had been found to contain excessive microplastics.
• According to Nathan’s profile on the Society for Science, he eventually developed chitosan powder from shellfish shells coll