Take a sneak peek into five BYU labs, including the quietest, cleanest, and “sickest” rooms on campus; one with a nuclear reactor using molten salt; and another where miniature cars drive themselves.

Dozens of alumni readers wrote in to BYU Magazine to share their first-person stories of attending BYU with a sibling. Read Giselle’s cautionary hair tale (above), Kelly’s identical-twin trickery, and stories of sibling rivalries playing out in the classroom. The next First Person topic is the post-mission transition to student life. Send your story to firstperson@byu.edu. If yours is chosen, you'll score $50.

Long before he became the head coach for BYU men’s basketball, Mark Pope played a decade of professional basketball—he was a rookie when his Indiana Pacers faced Michael Jordan’s Bulls in the 1998 Eastern Conference finals. After basketball, he attended medical school at Columbia University. Learn why Pope left school and drove from New York to Georgia, and how, years later, he continues his love-of-the-game coaching journey at BYU.

BYU Vocal Point director McKay Crockett (above) has a recipe for magic: get a group of singers together, add a room with great acoustics, and you’ll start hearing notes that aren’t being sung. What you’re hearing, but probably not noticing, are harmonic overtones, an element of music that can bring chills. Experience the magic in this new video.

A new six-year BYU study on video-game addiction among adolescents found that 90 percent of gamers do not experience negative long-term consequences. However, the same study showed that the remaining 10 percent did experience pathological gaming symptoms, including higher levels of depression, aggression, shyness, and anxiety. Read more details here.

BYU alum and plastic surgeon Benjamin J. Rodriguez was on a medical mission to Ghana when he had to share some bad news with a hopeful 18-year-old mother: her 5-month-old child with a cleft palate didn’t qualify for an operation. See how tears eventually turned into smiles in this story, one of several tales of alumni going forth to enrich the world through service.

Each year for the past five years, students at BYU’s Center for Animation have been tasked with creating an entire video game from concept to finished product. This year's team created the game Avast Ye!—and made a little history along the way by being the first to win the top prize in both game play and visual design at the Intel University Games. Read about their swashbuckling bug adventure and visit Steam to download and play the game for free.

“Before Harry Potter, there was Treasure Island,” says BYUradio host and producer Sam Payne. An inventive Peabody-nominated podcast reworks Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic story by adding time-traveling pirates and telling the tale with a trove of talented voice actors. Check out the audio trailer and all 10 episodes.

When winter-semester classes moved to remote learning, MBA student Trevor Lemmons made the most of it by creating a different online persona each day, from a Roman citizen to Wilson the volleyball (above) to animals and movie characters. His clever costumes and backgrounds promptly earned him the fitting title of King of Zoom. Don’t miss the hilarious gallery of screenshots.