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Parents may be confused about the status of vaccines for their kids after President Trump's new executive order. It's important to know nothing is changing right away.

President Trump signed an executive order Monday related to childhood vaccines in an Oval Office ceremony, flanked by top health officials and a conservative commentator who talked about her child and her current pregnancy. Those attendees called the move "historic" and "a big deal."

But what's different today when it comes to childhood vaccine policy in the U.S.? Not much. There's no new research, no new vaccines available and no immediate change to insurance coverage or school requirements.

And so far, pediatrician Dr. Jennifer Shu in Atlanta says parents in her practice aren't asking her about what the executive order means for their kids.

NPR's Leila Fadel speaks with Shea Vance of The Chronicle of Higher Education about a University of Michigan plan to forgo letter grades for some freshmen in their fall 2027 semester.

The University of Michigan is trying a new approach to curb the mental health crisis among college-age students: covering freshmen's letter grades during their first semester.

Starting in fall 2027, students entering the university's College of Literature, Science, and the Arts will receive pass or no-credit marks on their transcripts for the first semester, instead of traditional letter grades. Their actual grades will still be kept internally.

The university says the pilot program is intended to ease academic pressure, helping freshmen adjust to college and helping them "start strong and curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals."

Four states have recently passed legislation to limit teaching and assessments via screens for students. So has the United States' second-largest school district.

When Lila Byock's oldest son was 11, she began to worry about how much time he spent on his school-issued iPad. It seemed as if he wasn't allowed to go anywhere without it.

"To the point that he was one day penalized for not having his iPad with him during PE class," she recalls.

She asked his school in central Los Angeles to explain why there was so much digital learning, even years after the COVID-19 pandemic: "There was no justification for why it was better," she said. "It was just sort of, 'Well, we got these things during COVID and might as well keep using them.'"

Byock started talking to fellow parents and formed Schools Beyond Screens, an advocacy group with thousands of parents, beginning in Los Angeles but eventually expanding around the United States. She says whenever she talks to parents, they all have the same question: "This is an emergency — what can we do about it?"

New research shows that YouTube is used not just as an occasional supplement, but as a staple of classroom instruction.

Approximately three-quarters of 393 preschool and K-12 teachers in the U.S. say they use YouTube for instructional purposes, with roughly half using it on a daily or weekly basis, according to our new nationally representative survey.

Those findings come from our new research, published in June 2026 in Educational Researcher, an academic journal.

Our sample included teachers from all grade levels and subject areas, and from across public, charter and private schools.

Our results revealed that teachers who said they use YouTube as an instructional tool do so for a considerable amount of classroom time, alongside other common teaching methods like lectures and group work.

You may have heard the phrase “we are made of star-stuff.” This statement by the astronomer Carl Sagan refers to the fact that elements heavier than hydrogen and helium were forged in the centers of the first stars. But how does this star-stuff evolve into the chemistry of rocks, plants and people?

As an astrochemist and radio astronomer, I study the places in the universe where stars are born as interstellar laboratories. I’m interested in how simple ingredients come together to form bigger and bigger molecules, including those that are building blocks of life. One way I do this is by mapping molecules in space and finding patterns between how abundant they are and the conditions around them.

Interstellar maps can help scientists find patterns that tell them about fundamental chemical processes in the cosmos.

By targeting medical schools for prioritizing diversity, the Trump administration insists on a century-old belief that Black people are unequipped to practice medicine.

In May, the Justice Department announced its findings that the Yale School of Medicine uses race in admissions reviews despite the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling striking down those race-based programs. After a nearly yearlong investigation, the department claimed that a Black or Hispanic student had “a substantially higher likelihood of being offered admission than a White or Asian student with the same academic credentials.”

Yale recently announced that the university plans to negotiate changes with the Trump administration. (It’s worth noting that the department only looked at grade point averages and standardized test scores, not any of the several other parts of the medical school’s applications.)

Most research on kids’ screen time has focused on a child’s behavior. Far less attention has gone to parents and their role in their children’s media use.

Big tech is in a lot of trouble, as the law, the financing, and the American people turn against them. Plus, Amazon's antitrust troubles, and a crack in the electric utility high billing scam.

We’ll start with the legal piece, because that’s the part mostly not being covered by the press. For years, the main thrust of the assault on big tech came via antitrust law, the argument being these companies are monopolies thwarting competitors and extorting customers. But over the past few years, it seemed like the antitrust campaign against big tech ended in failure. One judge ruled that Meta is not a monopolist, and a different judge ruled that Google is a monopolist, but then mandated irrelevant and minor penalties. And there are rumors the DOJ case against Apple may settle.

But it increasingly looks like these legal setbacks were a pause before a much larger assault on their power. It’s just that it may not come through the antitrust channel, but by taking on the tyranny of unregulated algorithms. Here’s what I mean.

Much of the consumer internet-economy operates on top of feeds that draw one’s attention. Meta, TikTok, and YouTube all have high profit margins because they use feeds that require little human curation, and thus have low operating costs. But just because outlays are low for the companies themselves doesn’t mean there aren’t costs, it just means that they are borne by users and communities, in the form of bullying, sex trafficking, addiction, polarization, shorter attention spans, et al. It’s like pollution, where a company pours chemicals into a river, which doesn’t cost the company anything but does poison entire communities downstream.

For decades, tech firms have lobbied to stop states and the Federal government from regulating them. At the same time, they have argued in courts that algorithms are protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which prohibits companies from liability for third party behavior. Algorithms are also a form of speech, and thus are shielded from state action by the First Amendment. In cases such as Netchoice vs Moody, tech firms have claimed there is a constitutional prohibition against regulating them.

Two legal decisions this week suggest big tech will soon lose its legal protections. 

GALESVILLE, MD – Jack Torney guides his twenty-one foot working boat across dark, glassy water and through a series of coves as the early morning sunlight paints the horizon orange and yellow. It's a little after 5 a.m., and Torney, 23, is searching for the best spot to catch blue crabs.

"I enjoy being out on the water," says Torney, who wears a blond goatee, a camouflage cap, red T-shirt and baggy shorts. "Growing up, I didn't like going to school, just because I didn't like being in a building all day. I'd rather be in nature."

Two young crabbers are carving out careers on the Chesapeake Bay in a field dominated by older men. One is building a brand through TikTok. The other catches crabs one at a time.

Doctors are seeing more children injured - some badly - from e-bikes and e-scooters. NPR's Ayesha Rascoe talks with Dr. Cornelia Griggs and Caitlin Coit of Mass General Brigham for Children Hospital.

A federal judge in Boston has dismissed a Trump administration lawsuit against Harvard University. The Trump administration claimed the university did not do enough to protect students on campus from antisemitism.

In a new report, former Interlochen students detail some 70 allegations of sexual abuse by nearly 50 adults employed or affiliated with the school. One of the former students tells his story to NPR.

Paul Busch was 16 years old when he was sexually abused by his ballet teacher at the Interlochen Center for the Arts in 2005. At the time, Busch told NPR, he was living away from his parents, wanted more than anything to be a professional dancer and revered the teacher who harmed him.

Busch is sharing his experience publicly for the first time after spending 21 years reckoning with what happened to him at the Michigan boarding school.

"A lot of my desire was to prove that I was enough," Busch said. "That I was good enough and that I was worthy of love." He said that "this was the perfect condition" for someone to prey on him.

His story reflects the larger themes of a sweeping independent report, released last month, that details decades of sexual abuse allegations on the campus of the prestigious arts boarding school and summer camp.

Concentrated capital has a bunch of weapons it can deploy against regulatory threats. One of the most common is the capital strike, which Paramount is using right now.

Lots of monopoly news, as usual. A pollster finally asked about general approval ratings about AI, and it’s what you’d expect. Tyson’s is closing more meatpacking plants, a good appeals court decision on right-to-repair, and Apple keeps demanding the right to overcharge developers in its app store despite losing at the Supreme Court twice.

Before getting to the full round-up, I want to go over something that is a pretty common tool used to push back against populist policy - the capital strike. That is when an employer or financier uses their ability to withhold capital to threaten a political entity in order to secure desired policy changes. In the 1920s, then-Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon explained the basics: “Just as labor cannot be forced to work against its will, so it can be taken for granted that capital will not work unless the return is worth while.”

We are seeing this situation play out right now, as Paramount CEO David Ellison has told executives at his company that he will move the studio out of California if the Attorney General, Rob Bonta, does not allow his merger with Warner Discovery. He is also threatening to move CBS out of New York City to punish New York Attorney General Leticia James.

Momodou Taal and Amandla Thomas-Johnson were finishing their graduate degrees abroad because of targeting by the Trump administration. Cornell is ordering them back to campus.

Cornell University is reneging on its pledge to help two graduate students avoid immigration detention by threatening to cut their funding if they don’t return to the United States, where the Trump administration has targeted them for possible deportation over their participation in a pro-Palestine protest. 

The Ivy League university had previously told Momodou Taal and Amandla Thomas-Johnson that they could finish their degrees with funding abroad, according to both Taal and Cornell’s graduate student union. After the Trump administration began to pursue both students in March 2025, Taal and Thomas-Johnson fled to Cairo and planned to complete their studies there. Taal’s attorney said the students are not sure if there’s a deportation order against them, but Homeland Security Investigations, the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement intelligence division, has launched inquiries concerning both of them, and Taal was ordered to appear at an ICE office last year. The students believe they would likely be detained by immigration authorities upon return to the U.S.

Now, the school says the two students must teach on campus in Ithaca, New York, this fall or lose their funding.

Look up at the night sky and find patterns in the stars. You can do that, even though you’re standing inside the exhibition Makowa: The Worlds Above Us at Santa Fe’s Museum of Indian Arts and Culture through January 31, 2027. The wall-sized photo murals of day and night skies provide the backdrop to sculptures, pottery, and textiles with stylized images of stars, planets, the Sun, Moon, meteors, and changes of season.

After centuries beneath the Mediterranean, 22 colossal stone blocks are finally surfacing, and they may change how we see one of the ancient world’s greatest wonders.

The blocks had been on the seabed for centuries. Now, 22 of them have been lifted from the Mediterranean off the coast of Alexandria, each weighing between 70 and 80 tons, in an operation that researchers say marks a significant step toward digitally reconstructing the Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

A State Department report on this alleged problem is new, but its claims about alleged communist machinations being behind activist movements in the US are old.

“Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism” sounds an alarm without offering any new insights into Cuban intelligence operations or explaining how the Caribbean island could be undermining its northern neighbor when its own economy is on the verge of collapse.

Instead, the State Department re-ups an old conspiracy theory that partly blames Cuba’s communist leaders for contemporary U.S. social conflicts, such as the widespread protests held after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and what it calls “the rise of Antifa.”

Those movements “can be linked, in some way, shape, or form, to Cuban influence,” the State Department asserts.

This report is new, but its claims are old. I have often come upon similar conspiracy theories about communist machinations in my research regarding U.S.-Latin American relations in the 20th century.

PHILADELPHIA — Seven-year-old Khalib Townsend hikes in the rain along the Audubon Discovery Center's nature trail. He's all suited up in a bright blue waterproof jacket, holding in his small hands a pair of binoculars that hang around his neck.

Because today, he's going on a bird walk.

"I just really got interested in birds because I thought they were really cool and I wanted to study all types of animals," Khalib says with a big smile with his front teeth missing.

Khalib says he loves nature. He wants to study biology and learn about different plants and animals. This precocious first grader really wants to be a conservation scientist, "because I care for the Earth," he says.

Judge Bryan Biedscheid said in a ruling late Thursday that the bulk of the money will be used for treatment services for young people.

A New Mexico court has ordered Instagram and Facebook parent company Meta to pay $567 million to address harms to young people from its platforms in the second phase of a landmark trial.

Judge Bryan Biedscheid said in a ruling late Thursday that the bulk of the money — $420 million — will be used for treatment services for young people. The rest will go toward awareness and prevention, screening services and other costs over the next five years.

When summer rolls around, many parents scramble to sign up their young kids for outdoor activities. But what do you do when extreme heat and wildfire smoke increasingly make the outdoors dangerous?

On a beautiful summer day in July, seven-year-old Penelope is turning into a mermaid.

"I like playing mermaid," she says, with her feet dangling in the swimming pool at Beauvoir Summer Camp in Washington, D.C.

"Like, I'm a human, and then I turn into a mermaid and I use one of the pool noodles as a dolphin, and I play with my friends," she says.

It's Friday, which means free swim, and the kids are splashing around on blue kickboards and sinking miniature torpedo toys. In the kiddie pool, the littlest campers jump in and show off their twists and turns with screeches of delight.