Akash Vukoti is dancing on the couch and blowing spit bubbles when I first connect with him on Skype. The San Angelo, Texas-native may be 6 years old, but a few weeks Akash became the second-youngest child and the first-ever first-grader to qualify for the Scripps National Spelling Bee If that wasn't enough, Akash began reading before his second birthday, qualified for the high-IQ society Mensa when he was 3, became a Davidson Young Scholar at 5, and already speaks three languages. So forgive me if I forgot during a recent call with Akash and his father Krishna that even a prodigal 6-year-old still likes to dance and blow bubbles. "When I was little, I used to play with magnetic alphabet toys," Akash tells me, enunciating each word with astounding clarity. That was the first thing that struck me: how articulate he was. In between fits of throwing himself into the sofa and covering the lens of his iPad (much to his father's resistance), he

delivered strings of complex sentences with minimal effort. was also immensely polite, repeatedly calling me "Mr. Weller" even after I told him "Chris" was just fine. "I put them on the refrigerator, and my parents recognized this,""So they took me to a spelling bee competition, and on and on and on." His first bee was the MastiSpellhd44780 backpack competition, a spelling bee just for kids in 4th grade or below.naoto fukasawa backpack Akash entered when he was 2. kata 465 backpackFour years later, his proficiencykhamski backpack with language has started winning him national acclaim.fila dahlias backpack

On the premiere episode of "Steve Harvey's Little Big Shots" in March, Akash and Harvey matched spellingAkash successfully spelled derriere and connoisseur after Harvey butchered both. giggling all the way. That led up to the grand finale, when Akash reeled off with great confidence the correct spelling of a type of lung disease.asus g74sx laptop backpack "The greatest of all-time!" Harvey shouted, holding Akash aloft. "He just spelled mononucleosis in a volcano!" According to Krishna, his son's talents have come naturally sinceWhen I ask about their specific origin, Krishna's answer comes directly and without hesitation: "God." That talent is only magnified through hard work. Each day, regardless of whether Akash is training for the Scripps any of the other spelling bees around the country, he spends at least an hour going over his words.

Often, that hour turns into five, Krishna says. In the hierarchy of Akash's interests, spelling is right at the top. Everything else comes later. "I like geography, science, math. I like doing music and dance," he says, mentally scrolling through the list. "I like playing in the park with my friends. I like swimming in the park... swimming in the pool!" Akash is home-schooled — a recommendation given to his parents by a child psychologist shortly after the MastiSpell competition. Traditional kindergarten would have only left him bored, they learned, so now his mother, Chandrakala, works full-time as hisMany of Akash's friends come from the network of other homeschooled kids in the area. On their face, these factors may seem like liabilities for Akash's success at the Bee later this May. Historically, the Scripps winners have been 12-14 years old who are highly socialized to the competitive atmosphere and have had

exposure to many years' worth of words. home-schooled, and lacks up to eight years of studying compared to the rest of the field. But when I ask him if he's nervous at all for the big event, hisI almost felt silly for asking. "Just like in 'Little Big Shots,' I'm not nervous when going on stage," he says, repeating it again, this time louder and more emphatic than the first. "I'm not nervous at I'm hesitant to believe the normal biological response of anxiety doesn't affect even the brightest of young minds, but Krishna quickly backs him up. Fearlessness may just be another of Akash's "Both he and his big sister, they never had stage fright. don't know what that is," Krishna says. "And I'd like to keep itSix thousand years ago, the Egyptian wilderness was a very different place. Lions ruled, zebras gathered in large herds, giraffes foraged from tall trees. We know that, in part, thanks to drawings on the walls of ancient Egyptian tombs.

Can ancient art help us better understand modern Egyptian wildlife? Fossilized remains of plants and animals weave an intricate story of life and death in prehistoric Egypt, but conditions have to be just so for biological matter to become a fossil. To fill in the gaps, Santa Fe Institute researcher Justin Yeakel turned to ancient art and architecture. After all, early humans in the area were painting plants and animals well before the pyramids were even an idea. Art betrays the presence of hippos, giraffes, elephants, hartebeests, and foxes. A 5000 year old drawing shows ostriches and ibex. The nearly 2000 year old tomb of Khnumhotep II contains a scene (above) in which a curious cheetah sniffs a wary hedgehog. Yeakel combined these sorts findings into an ecological timeline already begun by palentological remains, which is described in PNAS. The most important signal for ecosystem health, they found, was the relative abundance of predators to prey. Writing for Science, Jessica Ruvinsky explains:

The researchers explored whether some of the ecological networks were more vulnerable than others. For each mammal community of the last 6000 years, they assembled possible predator-prey networks based on the body size of the animals (a cheetah is more likely to hunt a hedgehog than vice versa)—a system that correctly predicts who eats whom up to 74% of the time in modern African systems. Then they modeled the stability of each ecological network: How likely is a small change to cause a complete collapse? Over the last 6000 years, Yeakel found that there were five majors shifts in the make-up and diversity of mammals in the Egyptian ecosystem. Three of them were associated with broad environmental changes; namely, the Nile River Valley dried up. A another was associated with the population growth and rapid industrialization of the modern era. By looking at how ancient ecosystems responded to climate-related and anthropogenic changes, perhaps researchers can better understand how our current world will change as the planet becomes warmer.