The Informative Gazette

Aug 3, 2026 · Startup news for young innovators

Enterprise Desk

Ella, Francesca and Tallie sell bags made from waste textiles and rattan. Their business links a school in Hong Kong with young makers in the Philippines.

Aug 3, 2026 · 2 min · Ages 11-16

AI-generated editorial illustration: Informative

Tradeoff

A cross-border partnership can reach more customers, but fair decisions about work, ownership and revenue become more complex.

Try this

What would you ask each partner to check whether this venture is sharing value as well as work?

Enterprise Desk

An embroidered floral textile sits among threads, paintbrushes, packaging and a calculator on a craft worktable.

Reese Streicher built a business around painted and embroidered custom pieces. At Indiana’s largest student venture final, the audience gave it their vote.

Aug 3, 2026 · 2 min · Ages 11-16

An intravenous line and pressure sensor stand beside a monitor showing a small set of signal waves.

Riya Koya and Zaina Khan built OccluSense to make IV alarms more useful. Their hospital-safety venture won $25,000 after a competition that began with 1,174 student teams.

Aug 3, 2026 · 2 min · Ages 11-16

Two hands holding a smartphone above a plate of food to take a picture.

Zach Yadegari and Henry Langmack started Cal AI as 17-year-old high school students. Less than two years later, MyFitnessPal bought the company, and the founders are still teenagers.

Jul 17, 2026 · 5 min · Ages 11-16

A long row of black supercomputer cabinets in a large computing hall.

AI data centers are gobbling up electricity faster than anyone can build new power plants. A founder who dropped out of school at sixteen thinks the answer is a nuclear reactor small enough to sit next door.

Jul 17, 2026 · 5 min · Ages 11-16

Technology Desk

A lightweight four-wheel pedal rover stands on a rugged outdoor engineering test course.

Parish Episcopal School rebuilds its human-powered rover every year. In 2026, the team took NASA’s high-school title for the third year in a row.

Aug 3, 2026 · 1 min · Ages 11-16

A compact spherical mechanical actuator sits on an engineering bench with a small satellite model behind it.

Landon Kummer, Tobin Palmer and Brandon Kirbyson redesigned a satellite actuator around a spherical motor. A working prototype took them to the top of the Conrad Challenge.

Aug 3, 2026 · 2 min · Ages 11-16

A digital keyboard and headphones sit beneath layered responsive sound waves in a quiet studio.

Anusha Arora built HARMONI, an adaptive music-therapy platform. The project earned the 17-year-old a $50,000 award at ISEF 2026.

Aug 3, 2026 · 1 min · Ages 11-16

A hand-drawn app screen with a play button, sketched on paper resting on a tablet.

Apple's Swift Student Challenge picked 350 winning app experiments from 37 countries. The standouts tackle floods, hand tremors, stage fright, and missing instruments, all problems their builders know personally.

Jul 17, 2026 · 4 min · Ages 11-16

Money Desk

An electronic display board covered in glowing red stock prices.

The founders of AI hiring startup Mercor became the youngest self-made billionaires in history in October. Almost none of that money exists as cash, and understanding why is a money skill on its own.

Jul 17, 2026 · 5 min · Ages 11-16

Research Desk

Translucent cell and RNA patterns appear beside a research monitor displaying a coloured data map.

Anshul Raghav and Krishay Singh built OncoMap to study which head-and-neck cancers may respond to immunotherapy. The project won a top Conrad Challenge award.

Aug 3, 2026 · 2 min · Ages 11-16

Rainwater flows from a city road through a pale fibrous filter toward a clear salmon stream.

Lakshmi Agrawal designed a biodegradable sponge to capture a toxic tyre chemical before stormwater carries it into streams. Her work earned one of ISEF’s largest prizes.

Aug 3, 2026 · 2 min · Ages 11-16

Folded paper mechanisms spread across a workbench into a field of connected simulation paths.

Hikaru Kuribayashi turned a question about folding shapes into a new piece of simulation software. The result won the top prize at the world’s largest high-school science fair.

Aug 3, 2026 · 2 min · Ages 11-16

A turtle-shaped underwater robot scans tiny suspended particles in clear coastal water.

Evan Budz combined holographic imaging, artificial intelligence and a turtle-shaped robot to find tiny plastic particles in water without waiting for a laboratory.

Aug 3, 2026 · 2 min · Ages 11-16

Green and yellow paper models of many-sided geometric shapes arranged on a carpet.

Connor Hill wrote a computer program to find every possible noble polyhedron. The finished list won him the top prize at the 2026 Regeneron Science Talent Search.

Jul 17, 2026 · 4 min · Ages 11-16

Deep blue glow around a reactor core, seen from above through water.

Dozens of companies are promising small nuclear reactors. In the Idaho desert, one of them just passed its first real test, a moment engineers call criticality.

Jul 17, 2026 · 4 min · Ages 11-16

Build Challenge

Hands writing notes on paper at a wooden desk.

Every story in this edition started with someone noticing a gap. This challenge is the noticing step: pick a problem within arm's reach and pin it down in four boxes.

Jul 17, 2026 · 4 min · Ages 11-16

A wall covered in handwritten sticky notes sorted into columns.

Take one flashy tech story and shrink it onto a single card: the claim, the evidence behind it, and the test that is still missing.

Jul 17, 2026 · 4 min · Ages 11-16

Three students built a bag business across two countries

The custom-design business that won the crowd

Two students took on a dangerous problem with hospital IVs

Two teenagers built a calorie app. A fitness giant just bought it

The startup trying to power AI with tiny nuclear reactors

The school rover that won NASA’s course three years running

Three students cut a satellite steering system down to size

A music-therapy project wins one of ISEF’s largest prizes

The best student apps this year started with problems close to home

Three 22-year-olds are billionaires on paper. What does that mean?

Two students built a map for a difficult cancer decision

A sponge for the pollution washing off our roads

The 17-year-old who taught a computer to explore origami

The 17-year-old who built a sea turtle to hunt microplastics

A 17-year-old finished a shape hunt mathematicians started a century ago

A new reactor just went critical. That is less scary than it sounds

Map a problem you are close to

Build a claim card for a startup demo