When she was growing up in Waxahachie, Texas, in the early 1900's, young Bessie Coleman had to do without a lot of things. Because she was black, she went to inferior schools. Because her mother worked to support the family, Bessie often had to stay at home to watch her younger sisters. But Bessie Coleman always knew she would make something of her life. In 1920 she became the first African-American woman to fly an airplane. Struggling against prejudice...

Have you ever watched a home video that went viral on the Internet? Then you've probably heard of the company YouTube. YouTube was created by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim in 2005. When these three friends wanted to share a video from a party, they realized they were on to something. They thought other people would want an easy way to share videos online too. The website they built quickly became the most popular online video community...

Do you play computer games? If you do, you've probably played Minecraft. When Minecraft creator Markus Persson was young, he wasn't very interested in the games themselves. He was more interested in the programing instructions in the computer's manual. By the time Persson was eight years old, he was writing code for his own computer games. When he was eighteen, Persson landed his dream job as a video game programmer. In 2009, he designed Minecraft...

Have you ever used your imagination to solve a problem? When Albert Einstein was young, he was fascinated by the way magnetism made a compass work. As an adult, he used thought experiments to solve some of the universe's greatest mysteries. Einstein loved to think about math and science. He worked for a while at a patent office, but his mind wasn't focused on inventions. Instead, he thought about the universe. In 1905, Einstein's Special Theory of...

Have you ever dreamed of going to outer space? When Sally Ride was a little girl, she watched on TV as astronaut John Glenn launched into space. Twenty years later, she became the first American woman to go to space. Ride had loved science since she was young. Some of her teachers thought she was wasting her time studying science, but she went on to earn her PhD in astrophysics anyway. When NASA's astronaut training program opened to women, Ride...