Growing up, people always said how bad soda was, especially for kids. But that was never backed up because at every party or restaurant, my beverage choices were always Coke, Root Beer, Fanta or Sprite. And it’s still that way today.

Usually the only people speaking out against soda are nutritionists, but now young people between 14 and 21 are being given the chance to advocate for why soda isn’t good for us.

The contest is called “Soda Sucks.” Young people are encouraged to submit a video, a piece of animation, spoken word, rap or artwork to win $1000. The submission must creatively convey the message that soda is unhealthy.

Teenagers and young adults don’t always listen to what adults say especially in regards to something they enjoy, like sugary treats. Having young adults create an advertisement for this campaign is a great way to prevent drinking soda because it will be something visually and/or audibly appealing to youth. Everyone already knows that soda is bad, but hearing what people our age have to say about the issue solidifies the fact.

To get more information visit their website at www.whysodasucks.com/

Robyn Gee, Turnstyle News

The Google Global Science Fair, open to students ages of 13 - 18, just announced its winners: Shree Bose (17-18), Naomi Shah (15-16), and Lauren Hodge (13-14). As Slate was quick to point out, girls stole the spotlight in this competition.

Contestants submitted their science fair projects via a Google website, and the final event took place in Mountain View, CA at the Google Headquarters. All the winners had very sophisticated and complex projects.

Bose, the oldest winner of the fair, did her project under the supervision of Dr. Alakananda Basu at the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth, Texas. She looked at improving the efficacy of Cisplatin - one of the compounds used in chemotherapy. Oftentimes, as she explains in the introduction of her project, chemotherapy does not work because cancer cells become resistant to Cisplatin.

She was able to determine that the enzyme AMP-activated protein kinase, or AMPK plays a role in the resistance of the cancerous cells.

Check out Turnstyle's previous coverage on Women and Science. Recently, the Thiel Foundation's Twenty Under Twenty awards chose only two female winners out of twenty four, and researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst have tested the unconscious bias that deters women from STEM fields.

Obesity has been the biggest (no pun intended) word on the street these days. Good thing, because this is a serious topic. I was reading this one article that said in England, the British government wants to mandate exercise for children under five (even those who cant yet walk).
Read more...

Denise Tejada, Turnstyle News

Using a slingshot and a bird, the goal of the game is to knock as many blocks as possible with the least amount of birds to successfully pass to the next level. Yup, you guessed right, Angry Birds. Aside from being extremely addicting, one teacher in Atlanta, Georgia began incorporating the game into his lesson plan after reading about the physics behind the game from physics blogger, Rhett Allain.

Turnstyle spoke to John Burk, Physics Teacher at Westminster Schools in Atlanta, GA, about his lesson plan, and if including a highly popular game like Angry Birds helped his students understand physics better.

Turnstyle: Angry Birds and Physics: what do they have in common?

John Burk: People enjoy video games like Angry Birds because they take us into entirely different fantasy worlds. Those fantasy worlds have to have their own laws of physics, and it's a great mystery for students to see if we can divine those laws by conducting "experiments" in the Angry Birds'' world.

TS: Was it difficult implementing this lesson in your class? What were the reactions from students when you introduced this new lesson?

Burk: It wasn't that difficult. The wonderful thing about the world of physics bloggers is that fantastic teachers like Rhett are willing to freely share their ideas, and I can use his work to get started in developing a lesson of my own. I think my students were pretty psyched when we started a new unit by projecting angry birds on the smart board playing a few a games as a class. It was a definite hook to get them asking questions.

The following originally aired on KCBS.

By Tajah Jones

Growing up the silly rabbit attempting to steal the yummy colorful box of Trix cereal did tempt me into begging my mom to buy it for me, but she only bought Raisin Bran.

To help prevent child obesity the government proposed new regulations on food advertisements. If the product is unhealthy and targets children then the company needs to make healthier products or stop marketing to children.

This proposal made me wonder: who’s really responsible for filling the pantry with only Cheetos and Oreos?

Instead of pointing fingers at food companies, the government should put money towards educating adults and children on what a balanced meal looks like and how to cook nutritious foods.

Parents are ultimately responsible for the health of their children. My mom was never convinced by my temper tantrums or begging. I couldn’t leave the table if there were still greens on my plate. But now that I understand the importance of a balanced meal I won’t be a victim to obesity.

By Denise Tejada, Turnstyle News

Everybody has their own opinions about pageants, but if you're like me, you watch them for humor. California has taken the crown for Miss USA this year, but the amusement continued during the pageant.

I got a good laugh seeing several of the contestants respond to questions as eloquently as possible while making no sense at all, like Miss Teen South Carolina back in 2007. Showing that they're more than just good looking, or not, the contestants responded very firmly and honestly to the question "Should evolution be taught at school?"

Their answers may surprise you.

By Sayre Quevedo, Turnstyle News

This commentary originally aired on WAMU, American University Radio in Washington, D.C.

By Lalaram Guyadin, Latin American Youth Center (LAYC)

Charlie Foster, Turnstyle News

Ashton Kutcher may be wrong, but he may be right. The Village Voice, meanwhile, is definitely wrong, probably lazy, and also just plain mean. If you bear with me, I’ll tell you why…

“It’s tough to get numbers on this thing,” Special Agent Evan Nicholas told me last September. But this thing – the commercial sexual exploitation of children across the country – is exactly what Nicholas is supposed to be the authority on. He’s the supervisor of the FBI’s Crimes Against Children Unit and leads its Innocence Lost project. And yet every time I tried to pin him down with an estimate of just how many American kids are involved in the sex industry, he ducked and he dodged.

“You hear estimates of a few hundred girls to hundreds of thousands,” he said at the FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C. I was there reporting for a Youth Radio-NPR series on teenage sex trafficking in Oakland that aired last December. “The problem you face with showing an exact number, and that's what everybody wants to know... it's difficult to track these children because they are often runaways. It's such a transient population and no one was keeping a record of it.”

Nicholas said the FBI is keeping a record now. For one thing, the agency has “recovered over 1,200 children from the streets” since it started organizing nationwide anti-trafficking task forces in 2003. But that’s not the number it uses to describe the scope of the problem. In 2005, FBI Director Robert Mueller testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that “over 300,000 children per year are forced into prostitution.”

That number is the target of a cover story this week in The Village Voice, the latest of several recent news reports to claim that law enforcement, politicians, advocacy groups and reporters have overestimated the number of child sex trafficking victims in the US. In January, The Oregonian uncovered how local politicians had misrepresented stats to bring attention (and federal money) to Portland as a trafficking hub.

By Robyn Gee, Turnstyle News

The Thiel Foundation, set up by PayPal president Peter Thiel, recently awarded the Twenty Under Twenty Awards to young science and technology visionaries. Each fellowship winner received $100,000 to divert from their college trajectories and turn their ideas into realities.

John Marbach was one of those winners. His project, Ingenic, aims to improve Internet searches by sifting out the useless bits, and only giving the user the “reliable” results. “I wanted to attack the consumption end of the web, and find reliable content online... Reliable in the sense that you get good quality, something you actually want to see,” said Marbach.

He gave the example of a Spanish teacher looking for resources online. Marbach said, “There’s a lot of research online that could enrich the learning experience - news articles, YouTube videos to teach pronunciation, and Flickr galleries of the culture. But the search process is very disjointed. A teacher could go onto Ingenic for a frictionless user experience,” he said.

How would the curation process work? Marbach is in the process of figuring that out, but the idea is basically human curation. “We want to incentivize people to curate a collection of content. Some person would do all the searching and add all the links to the Ingenic platform, then they could share it and other people could follow it. There’s definitely community behind it. Any start-up needs to have a social component,” he added.