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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

Before Alka Menon's lecture "Trust Issues: AI, Medicine, and Modern Life," we were asked to read two pieces. On the surface they cover different ground. One is about AI creeping into mental healthcare, the other about how we measure public trust in science. But reading them back to back, I realized they are asking the same question from opposite ends: who actually decides what counts as trustworthy, and how do we even know when trust is there? The first reading, Mira Vale's "

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

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 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 field observation exercise recording the activity and diversity of pollinators in different parts of a public green space. Over the...

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”: Charming Little Menace 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.