Page Type: Elementary

Like many 8-year-olds, Ashwath Kaushik likes bike riding, LEGO, and hanging out with his friends. He also likes chess—and he’s really good at it. On February 18, Ashwath became the youngest person ever to defeat a chess grandmaster.

In the game of chess, grandmasters are considered the very best. It’s not easy to defeat one. Ashwath’s victory opposite grandmaster Jacek Stopa, 37, took place at a chess tournament in Switzerland. Only one other 8-year-old had defeated a grandmaster before, and he was five months older than Ashwath.

“I feel proud of my game and how I played. I felt amazing, just unbelievable,” Ashwath told CNN.

Ashwath started playing chess when he was 4 years old. He learned the game with help from a website called ChessKid. Before long, he was playing on a chess board against family members and winning. Today, Ashwath has a chess coach and some big dreams. What’s his goal?

“[I want to be] a world champion,” he told CNN. “That will be a bit of time. It won’t come quickly.”

“I practice a lot each day,” Ashwath said. “A lot of children have a natural talent, so I think I’ve got a natural talent at chess.”

When Lanny Smoot was about 5 years old, his dad brought home a light bulb, a bell, batteries, and wire. Smoot watched, amazed, as his dad put those things together in a way that made the bulb light up and the bell ring. He decided he wanted to see what he could make. Today, Smoot is a Disney imagineer—an inventor who has created some of Disney’s most incredible attractions.

Smoot’s journey to becoming an imagineer started soon after he saw that bulb light up. At school, he loved science class, and he entered every science fair there was. At home, he started taking things apart to see how they worked. He also started building new things from whatever materials he could find. He even put together a unicycle using a bike seat and part of a tricycle. (He can still ride a unicycle!) Eventually, Smoot went to college and studied engineering. An engineer is a person who designs complicated products, machines, systems, or structures. He became a Disney imagineer in 1998.

Coco Gauff just had a very good year. In 2023, the 19-year-old Gauff won the U.S. Open, which is one of the world’s four major tennis championships. Many people believe Gauff could become one of the greats in her sport.

Gauff’s rise in her sport has been slow and steady. She won some junior tennis titles as a kid, and pretty soon she was playing in major tournaments (tennis events) against some of the players she has always looked up to. In June 2019, Gauff had a chance to play at Wimbledon, a major tournament in England. Only 15 at the time, she played against the great Venus Williams—and won that round.

Since then, Gauff has had a chance to spend time with Venus and her tennis-star sister, Serena. She says the sisters are serious on the tennis court, but they know how to relax too.

“They’re goofy, fun people. That’s the coolest part,” Gauff told the Guardian. “They taught me you could be yourself and still be intense on court.”

Later in 2019, Gauff took part in the U.S. Open and found herself out of the contest when she lost a match against top tennis player Naomi Osaka. She was frustrated and upset. But at 16, she’d made it to the third round of one of the biggest events in her sport. It was a big deal. Gauff played against Osaka again, at the 2020 Australian Open. She won the match.

Gauff’s 2023 U.S. Open victory is her first win in a major tennis event—and her steady improvement suggests it won’t be the last.

Meanwhile, Time magazine sees a bright future for Gauff. The publication named Gauff as one of its 10 Women of the Year for 2024. The list is made up of what Time calls “extraordinary leaders.” Tennis talent isn’t the only reason Gauff made the list. She often speaks out on issues she cares about, such as climate change and equal rights for all.

Cuéntame! Translated from Spanish, it means “story me.” Author Meg Medina says it’s important to share stories, whether from books or from real life.

“‘Cuéntame’ is a phrase we use when you’re sitting down with a friend you haven’t seen in a while,” Medina says. “And you say ‘Bueno, cuéntame, so tell me what’s happening.’ … I love that idea because that is what I’m asking: ‘Story me up.’ Tell me the books that you love, [and] I’m going to tell you some of the books that I love.”

Medina is doing a lot of that these days. As the 2023–2024 Library of Congress National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, it’s her job to highlight the importance of children’s books. She calls her approach to the job “Cuéntame! Let’s Talk Books.” And she regularly visits schools and encourages kids to read and share stories with each other.

Growing up in a storytelling family is what led Medina to become an author.

“I came to writing through stories in my family,” she said. “I had very talkative Cuban aunts and grandmothers and mother, and they did a lot of talking and storytelling in the house. And that just developed my ear for story.”

Sea turtles are meant to live in warm water. So when Florida experienced a rare period of cold weather in early 2024, scientists went into action, rescuing more than 60 turtles and transporting them to a safer location.

Scientists from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission worked together to rescue the sea turtles from unusually cold waters of St. Joseph Bay, a body of water off the Gulf of Mexico. USGS biologist Margaret Lamont said that without help from humans, the turtles might not have survived.

Stick insects aren’t easy to find. Their twig-like bodies help them hide from hungry predators. But during a hike with his dad in 2021, 14-year-old Davis Marthin Damaledo spotted one of these amazing insects. Even more incredibly, the insect Davis found belongs to an undiscovered species!

Davis found the stick insect on the western side of the island of Timor in Indonesia. The teen, who loves nature and is fascinated with insects, thought this one looked unusual. He decided to gently pick up the insect, along with its eggs. When he got home, Davis contacted Garda Bagus Damastra. Garda is the founder of a science collective (an organization people can join in order to share scientific information) that focuses on certain types of insects, including stick insects. Excited to hear about Davis’s discovery, he contacted three entomologists (scientists who study insects).

Together with Davis, the group named the new species of stick insect Nesiophasma sobesonbaii, after a 19th-century ruler of Indonesia, and set about studying it. This included monitoring the eggs Davis had collected and watching as they hatched and the young stick insects grew to adulthood. The full-grown insects can reach 14 inches (36 centimeters) in length!

What’s the best way to get a bird’s eye view of a city? You could ride a giant Ferris wheel! A new Ferris wheel called the Twin Eye is being planned for Seoul, South Korea, and it won’t just be massive—it will also have an unusual design.

The Twin Eye is set to be 591 feet (180 meters) high, about as tall as a 45-story building. It will have 64 enclosed capsules, each able to hold 20 to 25 people, which means it will be able to carry more than 1,400 passengers at once! Because of the wheel’s size, passengers will be treated to a panoramic view of Seoul once they reach the top. There will be fun at the bottom, too. The wheel will sit on top of a building where people can watch performances and buy food and drinks.

Many people are familiar with Ferris wheels. They’re commonly found at theme parks and carnivals. Most Ferris wheels have spokes, which are bars that connect the outer part of the wheel to the center of the wheel. The entire wheel rotates, moving each car to the top and then back down to the bottom. The spokes help provide support to the outer part of the wheel.

Writing things by hand may be good for our minds. A new study shows that parts of the brain are more active when we are handwriting words than when we’re typing them.

In the study, scientists at a university in Norway recorded the brain activity of 36 students while the students typed a word or handwrote it in cursive with a digital pen. The scientists wanted to see if either of these activities would cause two parts of the brain to be active at the same time. That’s a sign that different parts of the brain are communicating with one another.

The scientists found that when the students wrote words by hand, many parts of their brains were active. When the students typed words, fewer parts of the brain were active. This is partly because writing words with a pen or pencil requires more motor skills, which are skills having to do with moving the body. Typing doesn’t require as much movement. But handwriting also seems to cause more activity in parts of the brain related to learning and memory.

Audrey van der Meer is one of the scientists who was involved in the study. She says people may learn and remember information better when they write it down by hand. But that doesn’t mean everyone should stop using computers and tablets. Typing is often easier and faster than writing. Scientists say it’s possible that writing things down is better for some tasks and typing is better for others.

A primate nearly twice the size of a gorilla once lived in the forests of southern Asia. But a little over 200,000 years ago, it went extinct. A group of researchers say they think they know why.

Scientists first identified the primate, called Gigantopithecus blacki or G. blacki, about 100 years ago based on the existence of huge teeth that didn’t match the teeth of existing primates. But they didn’t know why G. blacki no longer existed. What caused it to die out?

To answer that question, researchers collected some fossilized teeth and used a technique called luminescence dating to determine their age. The oldest teeth were more than two million years old, while the most recent were about 250,000 years old. Scientists estimated that G. blacki went extinct between 215,000 and 295,000 years ago.

Next, it was time to look at what happened toward the end of the primate’s existence. Scientists know that the climate changed around 600,000 or 700,000 years ago. The lush forests where G. blacki lived began to thin out. The fruit trees where it found most of its food were not as plentiful. Unlike other apes, G. blacki was too large to climb the trees and get the fruit that grew higher up. So, what did it eat? Scientists looked at the most recent G. blacki teeth and found scratches on them, suggesting that the huge primates started to eat less nutritious bark and twigs. Researchers say this is why G. blacki became extinct. It just couldn’t survive the changing environment.