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Some kids learn to play an instrument, some rather get into close combat with their peers and others become cheerleaders. Very few though attempt to achieve nuclear fusion when they’re just 14. And succeed. Taylor Wilson built his first bomb when he was 10 years old. Four years later he became the youngest person on Earth to ever build a working nuclear fusion reactor.

"Propulsion," the nine-year-old says as he leads his dad through the gates of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. "I just want to see the propulsion stuff."

A young woman guides their group toward a full-scale replica of the massive Saturn V rocket that brought America to the moon. As they duck under the exhaust nozzles, Kenneth Wilson glances at his awestruck boy and feels his burden beginning to lighten. For a few minutes, at least, someone else will feed his son’s boundless appetite for knowledge.

Then Taylor raises his hand, not with a question but an answer. He knows what makes this thing, the biggest rocket ever launched, go up. And he wants-no, he obviously needs-to tell everyone about it, about how speed relates to exhaust velocity and dynamic mass, about payload ratios, about the pros and cons of liquid versus solid fuel. The tour guide takes a step back, yielding the floor to this slender kid with a deep-Arkansas drawl, pouring out a torrent of Ph.D.-level concepts as if there might not be enough seconds in the day to blurt it all out. The other adults take a step back too, perhaps jolted off balance by the incongruities of age and audacity, intelligence and exuberance.

As the guide runs off to fetch the center’s director-You gotta see this kid!-Kenneth feels the weight coming down on him again. What he doesn’t understand just yet is that he will come to look back on these days as the uncomplicated ones, when his scary-smart son was into simple things, like rocket science.

This is before Taylor would transform the family’s garage into a mysterious, glow-in-the-dark cache of rocks, metals and liquids with unimaginable powers. Before he would conceive, in a series of unlikely epiphanies, new ways to use neutrons to confront some of the biggest challenges of our time: cancer and nuclear terrorism. Before he would build a reactor that could hurl atoms together in a 500-million-degree plasma core-becoming, the youngest individual on Earth to achieve nuclear fusion. Read on… (seriously, do!)

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Michele Bachmann is one of the darlings of America’s far right and considered running for presidency in the upcoming general elections. In her home district, evangelical Christians have created an extreme anti-gay climate. After a rash of suicides, the kids are fighting back.

Every morning, Brittany Geldert stepped off the bus and bolted through the double doors of Fred Moore Middle School, her nerves already on high alert, bracing for the inevitable. “Dyke.” Pretending not to hear, Brittany would walk briskly to her locker, past the sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders who loitered in menacing packs. “Whore.“

Like many 13-year-olds, Brittany knew seventh grade was a living hell. But what she didn’t know was that she was caught in the crossfire of a culture war being waged by local evangelicals inspired by their high-profile congressional representative Michele Bachmann, who graduated from Anoka High School and, until recently, was a member of one of the most conservative churches in the area.

When Christian activists who considered gays an abomination forced a measure through the school board forbidding the discussion of homosexuality in the district’s public schools, kids like Brittany were unknowingly thrust into the heart of a clash that was about to become intertwined with tragedy.

Please read the whole article here (printer/instapaper-friendly version on one page available here)

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A third of all kids in the United States don’t get educated about sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies or anything other than heterosexuality and archaic gender roles. Instead they are told to “just say no” to sex.

This is stupid not only because this abstinence-only sex-education doesn’t work—about 50% of all kids between grades 9 and 12 actually do have sex—it also leaves teens unprepared for reality which shows in the fact that states teaching abstinence have significantly higher rates of STDs and unwanted pregnancies among their teenage population than states with comprehensive, useful sex education.

But there’s another problem related to abstinence-only sex education as AlterNet points out:

I believe that the heyday of our federal investment in abstinence-only programs had a terrible collateral effect — namely, kids who were "educated" in this way were more likely to bully and harass because they learned, in ways integral to abstinence provisions, outdated "traditional" ideas about gender and sexuality. Even kids whose parents talked to them at home, about contraception or healthy sex, were taught gendered rules and more and more of them appear to have enforced those rules to great harm.” Read on…

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More and more U.S. schools have police patrolling the corridors. Pupils are being arrested for throwing paper planes and failing to pick up crumbs from the canteen floor. Why is the state criminalising normal childhood behaviour? The following reads like the Onion’s darkest satire but is, in fact, the sad truth for many kids who have to grow up into what is, quite literally, a police state.

Each day, hundreds of schoolchildren appear before courts in Texas charged with offences such as swearing or misbehaving on the school bus.. Children have been arrested for possessing cigarettes, wearing "inappropriate" clothes and being late for school.

In 2010, the police gave close to 300,000 "Class C misdemeanour" tickets to children as young as six in Texas for offences in and out of school, which result in fines, community service and even prison time. What was once handled with a telling-off by the teacher or a call to parents can now result in arrest and a record that may cost a young person a place in college or a job years later. Read on…

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Nicole was born as Wyatt, a boy, who always liked girl’s clothes and films, while her twin brother Jonas played with traditional boy toys. Born identical twins, the siblings share the same DNA, but their gender identification took divergent paths. Now, at age 14, they are brother and sister, as Wyatt’s transition to Nicole is well under way. And they were best friends all along. Their story — marked by tearful emotions, bullying at their first school and eventually a lawsuit and a move to a different town — was chronicled in the Boston Globe.

Jonas was all boy. He loved Spiderman, action figures, pirates, and swords. Wyatt favoured pink tutus and beads. At 4, she insisted on a Barbie birthday cake and had a thing for mermaids. On Halloween, Jonas was Buzz Lightyear. Wyatt wanted to be a princess; their mother compromised on a prince costume. Once, when Wyatt appeared in a sequin shirt and mum’s heels, their father Wayne said: “You don’t want to wear that.’’ — “Yes, I do,’’ Wyatt replied. “Dad, you might as well face it,’’ Wayne recalls Jonas saying. “You have a son and a daughter.’’ Read on… [via Towleroad]

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