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Completely avoiding Nestlé in the US is a pretty difficult thing to do in the US because the company owns over 2,000 brands across coffee, pet care, bottled water, frozen meals, and chocolate. For reference, there are many reasons why I believe you should avoid Nestle as a company overall. However, explaining all my grievances would take too long. A quick list from Wikipedia reads: forced labour modern slavery child labour incidents of contaminated and infested food products

I recently did some phage work that looks at bacteria that could have evolved defenses against those phages. Luckily, the results came back significant. I tested three different strains of E. Coli, each with its own introduced plasmid system. Then, after laying them out on the agar, I tested to see how well the bacteria defended against the phage. Each dot on the plate represents (from right to left) a dilution of phage concentration. Thus, a clearer clearing of the agar repr

A part of 16s sequencing in microbiology is the computational and analytical aspect that involves a significant amount of coding. Over the past week, I have been learning how to use a different kind of coding script called R. The core R language is primarily built on C, Fortran, and R itself. It was developed by statisticians as an independent, open-source implementation of the older S programming language. There are various tutorials that I've completed that are necessary fo

The title of the artwork is Under the Underground, a 2026 creation of Nancy Blum, part of the MTA Arts and Design initiative. The image depicts trees, yet the focus of this work is on what lies below. Underneath, roots shoot outwards in tangled lines that are identified by their specific colors: blue, green, yellow, red, orange. They are clearly subway lines, even if they may be interpreted as a root system of a tree, depending on how one chooses to look at it. I think that'

The Green and Resilient Zimbabwe Initiative is a proposed nonprofit for Buhera District, a rural area in Zimbabwe's Manicaland Province with around 245,000 residents. Most of them are subsistence farmers who grow maize and millet on communal land managed by local chiefs. When it rains, they eat. When it doesn’t, they go hungry. Buhera doesn’t have a water issue in the way I first thought. There is water underground, stored in aquifers beneath fields that are parched from the

For our group project at YYGS, we compared two things that sound completely unrelated: fungi and transportation engineers. The point of the presentation was that they are actually solving the same problem, just in very different materials. Fungi are a whole kingdom of organisms, including mushrooms, molds, yeasts, and mycelium. They don't photosynthesize like plants. Instead they break down dead plants and animals and return the nutrients to the soil, which makes them one of

Governing Acempur: What I Learned Building a Country From Scratch For the weekend of my Yale Young Global Scholars session in the Solving Global Challenges program, my team wasn't studying a country, we were creating and running one. Our assignment sounds simple until you actually look at it: take a nation that had just won its independence, and build a government good enough to hold it together. A country carrying a heavy history Acempur is a fictional set of islands in the

Prior to Alka Menon's presentation “Trust Issues: AI in Medicine and Modern Life”, we were required to read two articles. They seem completely unrelated. One discusses the infiltration of AI in mental healthcare and the other discusses how we measure public trust in science. However, by reading them one after the other, I have a revelation: both have the same question, albeit from different perspectives: Who is responsible for defining trustworthiness? Mira Vale’s “Building t

I took AP Biology as a course and APES self-taught myself out of a textbook. Therefore, I noticed something about second-time around students that they may have missed – that a large portion of what I was supposed to be learning in APES, I had actually already learned in Bio. More specifically, AP Bio Units 7 & 8 (Natural Selection/ Ecology) are a huge part of APES. The first unit is Unit 8 – Ecology. This unit discusses the flow of energy in trophic levels, which includes th

I go to school in Westchester County, and I have been trying to understand why hunger is so different from place to place in this relatively wealthy county. On paper, it is supposed to be one of the wealthiest counties in this country, but if you drive just eight miles, the situation completely changes. This is a mystery that has been bothering me. The county numbers indicate disparity. In 2023, according to it, around 11 percent of households in Westchester experienced food

After the AP Bio exam, our teacher's final assignment was something called an ecological scavenger hunt, wherein we took pictures of various ecological items on our school's property. Then we wrote a sentence explanation for each picture and presented it as a slideshow: I actually really liked this project because it involved a lot of collaboration between classmates. It was also just something really nice to do outside for a change when the weather started getting warmer. I

Dr. Reinmann is an ecologist and biogeochemist who focuses on plant ecophysiology and the terrestrial carbon cycle. He is particularly interested in understanding the effects of environmental change (e.g., climate change, urbanization, and land cover change) on the drivers of plant-mediated controls of terrestrial carbon cycling, and nitrogen dynamics as a limiting nutrient, across a continuum of human-disturbed ecosystems. His research draws from multiple disciplines and com

A few schoolmates and I have volunteered at Cooper's Corner, a memory care residence in Westchester where we spent time with residents living with dementia and Alzheimer's. Talking with someone who has Alzheimer's took me a while to stop doing badly because my instinct was to ask the questions you ask anywhere else (what did you do this morning, etc). Those questions can be quietly unkind in a memory care unit, because they ask a person to perform the exact thing the disease

I think when people talk about climate change, they usually picture melting glaciers or wildfires somewhere distant, but some of its most serious effects show up in ordinary places, like the produce aisle of a grocery store that no longer exists on Chicago's South Side. My civics project asked how climate change worsens food inaccessibility that urban minorities were already facing, and the answer turned out to have as much to do with American history as with the weather. The

A reflection on volunteering to help plan and host our school’s STEM Night for younger students and their families. Once a year, STEM club at my school hosts their annual "STEM Night", which involves elementary students from the school district coming to the High School building where us high school student put on science fair-esque projects. Mine was dry ice bubbles, and it works by placing dry ice in a glass filtering flask with warm water and a funnel on top of the opening

As part of the Independent Learners Program (ILP), which involves researching a topic you find extremely passionate about, our group of about 10 students met together to discuss our initatives If you are unaware, or even aware, of who Bryan Stevenson and the EJI is, I would reccomend looking at at least one of the following Watch Bryan Stevenson's TED Talk, We Need to Talk About an Injustice Explore the EJI website Bryan Stevenson page Hover over the OUR WORK tab at the top o

I just finished Unit 3 of AP Environmental Science on my own, working through a textbook and taking notes. Unit 3 is about populations: how they grow, what limits them, and what happens when a species runs low on room or food. What stuck with me is how much of the unit ends up being about food, even when it doesn't say so directly. Carrying capacity is the core idea. It's the largest population an environment can support with the resources it has. Populations tend to grow fas

A personal Synopsys For a class assignment at Brown Precollege, I put together a dramatic synopsis about one of the most infamous viruses in history: the 1918 influenza strain. Scientists recently reconstructed it using reverse genetics, which sounds like something ripped straight from a zombie movie, but the purpose was serious. By rebuilding all eight of the virus’s gene segments, researchers were finally able to test what made the 1918 strain so virulent. Here is the link

The “Spongivirus” Every now and then, a class project produces a virus so weirdly creative you almost want to root for it. The Spongivirus (officially D. spongiae Variant-1) is exactly that. Picture a virus with a sponge-like outer shell full of tiny pores and a yellow protective core inside. It’s basically the kitchen sponge of the microscopic world, just a lot less helpful. This thing runs on RNA, which means it mutates fast and never sits still. Long-term immunity? Not hap