A Bronx teenager started a nonprofit in Ghana with his allowance

Happy Tuesday. At 15, Max Owobu from the Bronx started saving his allowance to send a boy in Ghana to school. Three years later he's running an international nonprofit while studying for exams and applying to college. That's today's lead.

We also have a clay tablet just unearthed in Türkiye containing the world's oldest peace treaty, two student scientists who named a 309-million-year-old amphibian after their moms, and machine learning that just identified 130 compounds that can safely steer honeybees away from pesticides.

Dive in.

—Stephanie S

At 15, Max Owobu began spending his summers in Ghana — the country where his Nigerian father grew up — and started noticing something that stayed with him. Kids his own age were working, selling things on streets and in shops, helping their families get by instead of going to school. He didn't wait to grow up to do something about it. Not long after, he founded the Yenko Foundation, a 501(c)3, using money from his weekly allowance to sponsor a boy named Matthew through school.

The Yenko Foundation raises money to sponsor children through grades K-5 at Calvary Methodist Elementary School in Accra, covering tuition, school meals, uniforms, transportation, and supplies for $1,000 per child per year. So far, Max has channeled donations to put 10 children through primary school. His senior year has been interspersed with trips to Ghana to manage the foundation while studying for exams and applying to universities.

"The kids were just so joyous, so enthusiastic, so joyful to be going to school," he said of Calvary Methodist. His near-term aim is to sponsor 10 to 15 children through primary school before expanding to hospitals and orphanages. He's 18. Read about the scam school he nearly fell afoul of — and how one friend's tip changed everything.

Around 1,300 BCE, the armies of Pharaoh Ramses II clashed with those of Hittite king Muwatallis II in what may have been the largest chariot battle in world history — tens of thousands of soldiers, and no clear winner. The stalemate eventually led to something remarkable: a written peace agreement between two of the ancient world's most powerful civilizations. That agreement, the Peace of Kadesh, is the oldest peace treaty ever recorded, and a fragment of it was just unearthed at the ancient Hittite capital of Hattusa in Türkiye.

The clay tablet fragment contains articles 12-20 of the treaty, detailing how peace between Egypt and the Hittite Empire would be maintained. It is only the fourth known copy — three others inscribed in Akkadian cuneiform already exist, along with a version in Egyptian hieroglyphs on the walls of the Temple of Karnak — making it the only ancient Near Eastern treaty for which versions from both sides have survived, allowing direct comparison.

The United Nations keeps a copper replica of one of the original tablets on its wall — a gift from Türkiye in 1970. Archaeologists studied the new fragment for about a year before announcing the find, and now hope further excavation at Buyukkale will uncover the missing sections. Find out what the treaty's own language says about how the two civilizations agreed to treat each other's refugees.

Allison Sefcovic and Payton Kohlberg were Women in Science interns at the Field Museum in Chicago when they identified a previously unrecognized early amphibian in the museum's fossil collection. The creature lived 309 million years ago — long before the dinosaurs — in what is now the Chicago area, which was then a swampy river delta teeming with giant insects and strange swimming animals. It looked like a salamander but was squat and chubby like a frog.

When it came time to name the new species, the two students discovered a remarkable coincidence: both their mothers are named Jean. The result is Jeanerpeton mazonensis — "Jean's crawler from Mazon Creek" — formally pulled from the scientific "waste bin taxon" it had been lumped into for years and recognized as its own anatomically distinct animal. The fossil is so well preserved you can see the scales on its back, tiny belly ribs, and even the impressions of its eyes.

"It is scary to take on a project when you feel like you don't know as much as you should," said Kohlberg. "But I learned with my practical experience that it is possible to overcome that fear with hard work." The Mazon Creek site preserves details almost no other fossil deposit on Earth can match — learn what makes it a perfect recipe for fossilization, and what researchers believe is still waiting to be found there.

Honeybee populations have been in decline for decades, and one significant contributor is unintended exposure to pesticides on crops they visit while foraging. The challenge with finding a solution has always been the extreme complexity of the honeybee's olfactory system — more than 200 odor receptors capable of detecting a vast array of compounds, making it extraordinarily difficult to predict which scents would repel rather than attract them. Researchers at UC Riverside just cracked it.

Professor Anandasankar Ray's team built a machine-learning model trained on both the chemical structures of odorants and recorded behavioral responses of bees and fruit flies, then used it to screen more than 50 million compounds. The system identified approximately 130 with strong repellent potential — and when the top candidates were tested in the field, all seven reliably drove bees away from honey combs without harming them. Ray is now a co-inventor on a patent application for the compounds.

"Protecting pollinators doesn't have to come at the expense of food security," said Ray. "We believe our work will help guide further exploration of machine learning-guided solutions in environmental protection and sustainable farming practices." The compounds have applications beyond agriculture — see the surprising environments where keeping bees away safely turns out to matter just as much.

🎵 Mexico: A 300-year-old community music tradition from Veracruz called son jarocho — in which fandangos bring neighborhoods together for sweaty, joyous all-night jam sessions — is now finding new audiences in Argentina, Spain, Finland, Germany, Japan, and across the US, with young Mexicans flocking back to the tradition alongside reggaeton and corridos.

🐬 Pakistan: Pakistan has expanded protected habitat for the Indus River dolphin — one of the world's rarest freshwater dolphins — as the species shows encouraging signs of recovery, with conservationists calling the expansion a critical step in securing the animal's long-term future.

🏛️ Syria: A new study has revealed how archaeologists risked their lives to smuggle 30,000 ancient artifacts out of ISIS-controlled territory, hiding them in private homes and transporting them across dangerous checkpoints to prevent the treasures from being destroyed or sold.

💣 Kosovo: Twenty-seven years after the Kosovo War ended, the Halo Trust has concluded its mission to clear Kosovo of landmines, with cleared land having helped the economy grow to $14 billion and average life expectancy reach 78. Kosovo's Halo workers are now leading the charity's demining operations in Syria and Ukraine.

📚 Lesotho: In the mountains of Lesotho, tens of thousands of boys and young men work as shepherds and miss out on their education entirely — but a small network of night schools is giving them the chance to learn to read, write, and count, with some walking two hours down from mountain cattle posts to attend class before climbing back up in the dark.

On September 29, 1996, Nintendo released its 64-bit home gaming console in North America at $199.99, designed to compete directly with the Sony PlayStation — and compete it did. The N64 was the first console to offer four controller ports and could handle four-player split screen without significant slowdown, a feature that turned living rooms into arenas. In its first year alone, 3.6 million units were sold in the US.

The system launched in tandem with Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, both of which are still widely considered two of the greatest and most influential games ever made. It was the last major home console to use cartridges as its primary storage format — a detail that, in hindsight, marked the end of an era. Thirty years later, the N64 controller's distinctive three-pronged shape remains one of the most recognizable objects in gaming history.

Other notable September 29 events:

1990: Construction on the Washington National Cathedral was finally completed, 36 years ago today — 83 years after its foundation stone was laid in the presence of President Theodore Roosevelt, its 112 gargoyles including a Darth Vader carving on the north side, and Helen Keller among the 220 people interred within.

1954: Willie Mays made what is widely considered the greatest catch in baseball history, 72 years ago today — running down a long fly ball with his back to home plate in Game 1 of the World Series.

1988: Space Shuttle Discovery launched from Cape Canaveral, 38 years ago today, marking America's return to manned space flight after the Challenger disaster grounded the program.

1989: Bruce Springsteen stopped at a saloon in Prescott, Arizona while riding his motorbike, jammed with the house band, and donated $100,000 to cover a barmaid's hospital bill, 37 years ago today.

— Ken Robinson

Every day brings amazing advances and uplifting moments that remind us just how wonderful the world can be. Here are five reasons why today is the best time ever to be alive:

🧬 Drugs That Silence the Right Gene: Scientists have developed RNA interference therapeutics — short strands of RNA that switch off specific disease-causing genes — now approved for high cholesterol and rare genetic diseases, with dozens more in clinical trials targeting liver disease and cancer. For the first time, medicine can turn down the volume on a single faulty gene without editing the DNA itself.

💡 Solar Panels You Could Wear: Perovskite solar cells can be manufactured at a fraction of the cost of conventional silicon, with efficiency now matching silicon in laboratory conditions, pointing toward solar panels cheap enough to coat windows, rooftops, and even fabric. The economics of solar energy are about to change fundamentally.

🔬 Meat Without the Animal: Scientists and food companies are growing real animal muscle tissue from a small cell biopsy — no slaughter required — producing meat genetically identical to conventional meat while using a fraction of the land, water, and emissions of livestock farming. The first commercially approved cell-cultured chicken is already on menus in Singapore and the US.

🌱 Rocks That Eat Carbon: Ground-up volcanic rock spread on agricultural fields reacts with CO2 in rainwater and locks it permanently into stable minerals — a process called enhanced weathering that simultaneously improves soil fertility and crop yields. It is one of the few carbon removal approaches that makes farming more productive at the same time.

🔭 Using the Universe as a Telescope: Astronomers are using massive galaxy clusters as natural lenses — their gravity bends and amplifies light from objects behind them — allowing the James Webb Space Telescope to observe galaxies so distant they would otherwise be completely invisible. We are now seeing light that left its source just hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang.

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