When you think of pirates and bootleggers, there’s typically two places your mind might go: Punk kids, or vast organizations of bootleggers, all with thick accents. Hyman Strachman is neither of those, instead, he is a 92-year-old World War II veteran. He is however, probably one of the worlds foremost bootleggers. For eight years, Stachman has been running a pretty impressive bootlegging operation from his apartment, copying thousands of first-run movies, and sending them to U.S. troops overseas. Hardly some punk kid.

When I was a kid, a friend of mine and I decided to build a raft out of Popsicle sticks and glue a LEGO guy to it. Then we set it free in a nearby creek. It was awesome. Now, many years later, two Canadian teenagers did basically the same thing, except they sent their LEGO minifig into the far reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere using only equipment found on Craigslist. To boot, they filmed the whole journey, POV-style. My Popsicle stick raft is suddenly even lamer than it was to begin with.

Scientists digging through data from a 1970 British Cohort Study that followed nearly 8,000 people over a span of decades have recently published a paper concerning their findings that high childhood IQ was linked to above-average self-reported drug use in adult life; kids with high IQs tend to do drugs as adults. The study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health,  took much of the information collected by the Cohort Study, including socioeconomic status, levels of psychological distress, and found that the IQ-drug use parallels still existed even when controlling for these other variables.

In what must be one of the coolest — and most welcome — instances of political-geek news, Congressman John Lewis (D-GA) has signed on to write a graphic novel depicting his decades of work during the Civil Rights Movement, which will be produced by Top Shelf Productions. He will be the first sitting member of Congress to write a graphic novel, which makes this even more excellent. If there was any way to reach various audiences with your story, this is certainly an effective, exciting move.

This is both adorable and encouraging: A group of eight- to ten-year-olds in England wrote and published a journal article in the very legit “high-powered” scientific journal Biology Letters. According to an excerpt from the article’s abstract, the study covers “whether bees could learn to use the spatial relationships between colours to figure out which flowers [to visit].” With the exception of the abstract, the kids wrote the entire article themselves. What have our kids been doing lately?

The 25 kids, who attend Blackawton Primary School in Devon, England, conducted the study through the educational science program, “i, scientist,” which encourages children to conduct their own scientific research and is overseen by the kids’ head teacher, David Strudwick, and neuroscientist Beau Lotto, whose son, Misha participated in the study. (There’s a half-hour video about the program here.) The kids are officially “the youngest scientists to publish an article in a Royal Society journal.”

Apparently gluttons for punishment, 13 years after losing a chess game to a computer, humans have challenged the mighty machine to a round of Jeopardy to be aired in February. The two biggest winners on the show, Ken Jennings ($2.5 million) and Brad Rutter ($3.6 million), will be pitted against an IBM Power 7 server named Watson. (As in IBM founder Thomas J. Watson and not as in, “Elementary, my dear, Watson,” which has actually never been said by Sherlock Holmes. I’ll bet Watson didn’t know that. On second thought, he/it probably did.)