The Informative Gazette

Jul 17, 2026 · Startup news for young innovators

Enterprise Desk

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

Photo: FranHogan (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons

Tradeoff

A fast estimate is useful every day, but a rough number can mislead someone who needs precision.

Try this

Find one repetitive task in your week that takes more than a minute. Write down what a five-second version would look like, and what it would be allowed to get slightly wrong.

Enterprise Desk

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 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

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

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

The startup trying to power AI with tiny nuclear reactors

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

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

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