Two Detroit-area teens and an Egyptian student win the inaugural contest put on by YouTube and Lenovo, will have bacteria and spider experiments performed on ISS.

The young winners of the first global YouTube Space Lab competition will have the scientific experiments they devised performed by astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) including a somewhat scary-sounding attempt to breed 'alien superbugs."

Sara Ma and Dorothy Chen, 16-year-old juniors at Troy High School near Detroit, were named winners in the younger student category Thursday for their experiment testing microgravity effects on bacillus subtilis bacteria. The pair will send three vials of the bacteria into space, one with an unaltered specimen, another containing fertilizer, and the last containing phosphate ions, while a fourth container with a control specimen will stay on Earth.

"The idea that something that is your experiment being sent up into space and actually becoming a reality is incredible," Ma (pictured above to the right of Chen) told Reuters after she and Chen triumphed in the competition sponsored by Google's YouTube video-sharing site, computer maker Lenovo, and Space Adventures, a company that puts together space trips for private individuals.

Ma and Chen want to see if they can turn the relatively harmless QST 713 strain of B. subtilis into a virulent, fungus-killing bacteria in the same way that space-cured salmonella became more deadly in an earlier experiment (see the pair's video proposal below).

The older group's winner, 18-year-old Amr Mohamed of Egypt, also proposed an experiment involving creepy little life forms. But Mohamed simply wants to see if zebra spiders can figure out how to adjust their leaps to catch prey in space, not create a whole new mutant race of them.

Some 150,000 YouTube users voted in the contest, which began last year. The winners will have their experiments performed by NASA astronaut Sunita Williams and live-streamed over YouTube from a Lenovo laptop.

Ma, Chen, and Mohamed will also get to experience the simulated weightlessness of space on a "zero-G" flight. The winners had a choice of two grand prizesMa and Chen are opting to go to Japan to watch the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launch the rocket carrying their experiments up to the orbiting space lab, while Mohamed has decided to spend a week doing cosmonaut training at Russia's Star City facility.