Young STEM Journalism Articles

This article was written by an outstanding participant in Double Helix’s Young STEM Journalism Bootcamp!

This year, Letterly partnered with Double Helix to launch the inaugural 4-week program, inviting students aged 8 to 18 to write science news articles on the topics that matter to them! This article went through multiple rounds of editing with 1-to-1 feedback from Letterly’s highly qualified and passionate writing coaches. 

Students were asked to research topics about the most innovative and world-changing current events in the STEM world, ranging from AI in education, to genetic engineering, to gophers saving volcanic plains!

Articles written by Students

Gloria L.

Most Meteorites on Earth are “Siblings”!

Imagine: you are in a dark, black, space. You see stars in the distance, and you can’t hear anything. You can’t see any light other than the shiny surfaces of planets and the stars that might have planets that support life, just like your beautiful planet Earth does. What you are imagining is space, where we can also find meteors.
Gloria L.

Killer Whales on the Hunt

The 8-meter killer whale, otherwise known as Orcinus orca prey on animals like turtles, fish and other marine mammals. Scientists have found that killer whales have the abilities to hunt the biggest known fish on Earth: the whale shark!
Gloria L.

Largest Known Prime Number Discovered

Luke Durant found the largest prime number in October of 2024. It contains 41,024,320 digits. The number was 2136279841-1 on GIMPS. Luke Durant, a 36-year-old NVIDIA employee, used GPUs to conclude that 2136279841-1 is prime. Durant is a member of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS). GIMPS has named this number M136279841 instead of the actual number (because the actual amount would be too large to write). Durant’s number beats the previous number (discovered in 2016) in digits, by 16,000,000 digits. He was in a line at the airport when he found that one of his supercomputers had come out with a number that was probably prime. He says he “wasn’t as excited as I could be about finding the number."
Gloria L.

New Ways to Explore the Depths of the Ocean

Researcher Kylie Maguire from CSIRO sits in front of a large computer screen. Her eyes dart around the page as she looks at the newly taken pictures from an expedition off Southern Tasmania, and her eyes stop at one of them. Kylie recognises what it is: an underwater nursery for the Antarctic skate! Her colleagues all stare at their own computer screens, peering at the images taken by the underwater picture takers Marimba, UMI and IMOS. This scene shows use of the IMOS (Integrated Marine Observing System) and the UMI (Understanding of Marine Imagery project) which are showing the underwater world to scientists and the general public and building on to different projects.
Gloria L.

Old Clothes are Recycled into Concrete

Over 200,000 tonnes of textiles end up in Australian landfills. A team at RMIT University in Melbourne Australia have found a way to lower this number. David Law, Chamila Gunasekara, Shadi Houshyar, Sujeeva Setunge and Nayanatara Ruppegoda Gamage are all part of the team that used old textiles as a material in concrete to help reduce cracks and boost the durability of it.