Teenagers in Oregon Are Working to Stop a Gigantic Government Highway Project Last year, a group of high school freshmen in Portland, Ore., learned that their city was planning to expand a highway that runs past a local middle school. It seemed like a bad idea. They saw the problems freeways were causing: traffic, greenhouse-gas emissions and pollution. So they decided to act. Every other week for more than a year, they have been protesting outside the Oregon Department of Transportation headquarters — and furiously organizing, bringing in speakers and making signs. "We want the money from freeway expansions to be reallocated to things that will better serve our communities," says Naomi Hemstreet, 15. The construction project will cost an estimated $1.2 billion. Naomi thinks that money should go to things like improving public transportation and adding bike lanes. As the protests grow, politicians and other environmental-justice groups are taking note. The teenagers are seeing other signs of progress too: Earlier this year, the federal government told the transportation department it had to keep studying how the construction would affect the environment before it could get permission to start paving. For the activists, it was one small step toward realizing their freeway-size goals. Abhimanyu, 13, is the World’s Youngest Chess Grandmaster Abhimanyu Mishra still remembers the first time he won a chess tournament. He was 5. "That win definitely motivated me to go further," he says. So he set his sights on becoming the youngest-ever grandmaster, the highest rank in the game. It wouldn't be easy. Among the estimated 600 million chess players in the world, fewer than 2,000 are grandmasters — and the last age record was broken almost 20 years ago. To get the title, a player has to earn points by competing in tournaments and beating opponents. Abhimanyu, who is 13 now, trained eight to 10 hours each day at home in New Jersey and played about two to three tournaments each month, usually against adults — and often late into the night. Then a bigger challenge hit: The pandemic shut down many competitions. So last spring, Abhimanyu and his dad traveled to Hungary, where matches were still taking place in person. He played 70 games in 78 days and finally secured the wins he needed. He was 12 years 4 months old, the youngest-ever grandmaster. "Sometimes, people might think of me as some little kid," he says. "They learn in the game that this is not the case." Ryan, 12, is Growing a Recycling Business On a Tuesday afternoon last month, 500 kids and adults with gloves, grabbers and trash bags fanned out across Long Beach, Calif. By the end of the day, they had collected 490 pounds of trash: "The most I've ever found," says Ryan Hickman, 12, whose company, Ryan's Recycling, organized the beach cleanup. Ryan went with his dad to the local recycling center for the first time when he was just a little kid. "It was fun, and I saw it was helping the environment,"