There’s a different kind of space race under way, one that has engineers trying to crack the code on the best way to build on other celestial bodies. Concepts to build on the Moon have included using lunar dust and materials that could generate electricity, while for Mars scientists have explored no-bake bricks and 3D-printed ones using planetary minerals.

Now, from the team that earlier developed AstroCrete, fashioned out of blood, urine and Martian dirt, comes the slightly more palatable StarCrete, made from extraterrestrial dust, potato starch and a dash of salt. And the team says it’s strong enough that it could feasibly build houses on the planet.

Earlier this month, Florida Republicans introduced and advanced a wave of bills on gender and diversity that, if passed, are likely to be signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R). One GOP lawmaker acknowledged that his proposed sexual health bill would ban girls in grades younger than sixth from talking about their menstrual cycles in school.

During a hearing on the bill, Democratic Rep. Ashley Gantt asked, “So if little girls experience their menstrual cycle in fifth grade or fourth grade, will that prohibit conversations from them since they are in the grade lower than sixth grade?”

Rep. Stan McClaire, who chairs the Florida House Education Quality Subcommittee, said, “It would.”  The measure was passed by the committee on March 18 on a 13 to 5 vote, mainly along party lines.

Reading that piece of bad news made me think about Judy Blume’s young adult novel, “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret,” first published in 1970 and in print ever since.

When a Denver teen shot and injured two school administrators on Wednesday, it marked the third time this year that gun violence had rocked East High, the city’s largest high school.

For the schools superintendent, it signaled the need for a dramatic shift in district policy: the return of police at comprehensive high schools for the remainder of the school year.

“I can no longer stand on the sidelines,” Alex Marrero wrote in a letter to the school board, which voted in 2020 to remove police from schools. The city’s mayor quickly backed the decision, and even a local group long opposed to police in schools acknowledged that acts of violence “force hard conversations.” On Thursday, the school board agreed to temporarily lift its ban on school police.

The turnabout in Denver echoes recent decisions to bring back school police by a few other districts across the U.S. In some cases, as in Denver, these debates are coming to a head after a shooting or other act of violence on campus erodes support.

Joy Malak floundered through her freshman year in college.

"I had to learn how to balance my finances. I had to learn how to balance work and school and the relationship I'm in." The hardest part about being a new college student, Malak said, "is not the coursework. It's learning how to be an adult."

That took a toll on her grades. "I didn't do well," said Malak, who powered through and is now in her sophomore year as a neuroscience and literature double major at the University of California, Santa Cruz, or UCSC. "It took a while for me to detangle my sense of self-worth from the grades that I was getting. It made me consider switching out of my major a handful of times."

Experiences like these are among the reasons behind a growing movement to stop assigning conventional A through F letter grades to first-year college students and, sometimes, upperclassmen.

We should have been miserable,” said Emily Grijalva, recalling the first days of the 2019 strike by Los Angeles teachers. Grijalva, who is currently the community school and restorative justice coordinator at Felicitas and Gonzalo Mendez High School, joined her colleagues on the picket line in 2019 despite the biting cold and an unusual, prolonged rainstorm that flooded city streets and sidewalks and drenched picketers. Many of them did not wear, much less own, suitable rain gear for their normally sunny, mild Southern California climate.

“But even through the rain and cold, we felt togetherness and support from the community. Families dropped off food for the teachers, students and parents joined us on the front lines, and people opened their homes to let us dry off or use the bathroom,” she said.

Grijalva’s experience in 2019 might get a replay in 2023 as, once again, teachers in Los Angeles joined in a three-day strike in support of the 30,000 school service workers who are leading the labor action. One factor that may figure prominently in the teachers’ corner is their success in 2019 at convincing the district to provide funding for converting 30 campuses to what’s become known as community schools.

Spencer Cox, Utah’s Republican governor, signed two measures on Thursday meant to protect kids from the pernicious effects of social media. Starting a year from now, services like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube will be required to obtain parental consent for any Utahns under the age of 18 to be on the platforms.

The laws also prohibit management “from using a design or feature that causes a minor to have an addiction to the company’s social media platform.” Minors would be prevented, as Bloomberg Law has reported, from using social media “during certain overnight hours without a parent changing the account setting.” Companies failing to enforce the rules could incur a fine of $2,500 per individual account or violation.

The model of aggression and dominance has infected human society. But new research shows how wrong we go it.

WASHINGTON — U.S. House Republicans on Thursday continued to press accusations that a “woke agenda” is deteriorating parents’ rights in their local school districts.

The first hearing this Congress of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government convened to examine whether a 2021 Department of Justice memo played a role in “chilling” parents’ First Amendment rights at local public school board meetings.

The GOP has for roughly 18 months targeted an Oct. 4, 2021 memo issued by Attorney General Merrick Garland instructing federal law enforcement across the U.S. to “open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response” on possible criminal threats to local school board members over politically charged issues that flared up during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The single-page document by Garland directed the Federal Bureau of Investigation to be on alert for “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence” aimed at local school officials and teachers.

Garland has defended the memo, including during appearances before Congress.

While honeybees are famously difficult to study, altering natural behaviors if any outside influences are sensed, they’re also incredibly susceptible to colony collapse due to the cold. If hive temperatures drop below 50 °F (10 °C), the bees cease buzzing and generating their own heat, and slip…

Samples taken from the near-Earth asteroid 162173 Ryugu continue to provide scientists with important insights. The discovery of the nucleobase uracil, a part of RNA, in the samples, hints at the potential beginnings of life on our planet.

As an art student I was exposed to artworks that used popular iconography to make socio-political statements. For example, Renee Cox, whose photographs — frequently self-portraits — explores issues related to the representation and exploitation of Black bodies while seeking to create new positive imagery. Kehinde Wiley’s tapestry-sized paintings reexamine representational cannons and widely accepted social stereotypes of Black Americans.

"Wiley’s paintings are apparently influenced by the Old Masters, and can be perceived as hybrids due to their stylistic and representational heterogeneity; for instance, the hip hop aesthetic mixed with Islamic architecture and the French Rococo." — Widewalls

Cod’s cousin, Boston’s longtime favorite, embodies the American fishing experience

Even though Venus is the closest planet to Earth, there's still a lot we don't know about it, especially when it comes to its galactic-scale history. Was it once habitable? Did it ever have water? Was the atmosphere ever different than the toxic cocktail of carbon dioxide and sulphuric acid that swirls around its blazing surface today? Could it be a cautionary tale for Earth? To find out, astronomers have proposed using the James Webb Space Telescope to look at five exoplanets that exist in the Venus Zone.

Humanity’s eyes have been turned to the heavens of late. Images from the James Webb Space Telescope of Neptune’s rings and star nurseries transfix our imaginations. Each launch of an Artemis rocket fills us with hope as we take the next steps toward living on Mars. Space unites in common dreams and questions, humility and wonder.

Awe in the face of a vast universe is the shared experience of those who travel in space. Many astronauts have a profound spiritual experience as they orbit the Earth. They return with a deep sense of humanity’s connection to all of creation. They do not see a conflict between the science that took them to space and spiritual experiences they had there.

And yet, since the Enlightenment, there has been an abiding tension between science and religion.

It was much busier than usual on a recent Friday at a Ben & Jerry's in Melbourne, Fla. But it wasn't the Cherry Garcia and Chunky Monkey drawing the extra customers.

A crowd gathered in the back corner of the store, browsing through newly installed, rainbow-colored shelves displaying multiple copies of some 65 books currently banned from various Florida schools. It was opening night for the shop's "Banned Book Nook," and customers with ice cream cones in one hand helped themselves to novels, memoirs and biographies with the other.

"This is my favorite series ever," exclaimed one young woman browsing the titles.

About 150 books were lent out that first night. The book nook was set up by Florida teacher Adam Tritt and Foundation 451, a group he launched last year after he was ordered to remove banned books from his classroom in nearby Palm Bay.

"My reaction was, 'Uh, no! I cannot allow this to happen,' " Tritt recalls. "If a kid needs this book, we want them to have it."

More than 80 percent of K-12 schools experienced supply-chain issues; food services were most commonly identified as impacted by supply-chain disruptions

It’s long been a truism among liberal political writers that a great deal of conservative culture-war politics is misdirection that disguises the GOP’s real policy agenda. By far the most consistent laws the Republican Party has produced in office since the 1980s are tax cuts for the rich and deregulation. This type of thing is unpopular, even among Republican voters, and so a regular supply of shiny objects is needed to distract them.

That is of course true of the latest conservative hate frenzy: the crusade against “wokeness,” which the right increasingly uses as a catchall slur for everything they dislike—diversity, reproductive rights, accurate history, climate policy, the dissolution of a failed bank, and so on. Meanwhile, beneath the din, typical pro-rich policy is quietly written up.

Yet not only is the anti-woke frenzy covering up the oligarchic economics of the GOP, it is also directly profiting the allies of Republican politicians. Helping corporate CEOs and anti-woke grifters: Like the gif says, why not both?

A proposed change to the census faces opposition from Afro-Latino groups, and exposes conflicts among Latino communities.

Religion has permeated human life for thousands of years and archeological evidence exists of religious practices associated with the earliest humans. After the establishment of more organized societies, religion commonly became integrated with government. 

A strong connection existed between government and religion in Roman society.  In the European Middle Ages, the early Christian church dominated medieval life while the Spanish Inquisition demonstrated a religion-infused government that used torture and execution to eradicate opposition. 

Eventually, in Europe, schisms arose between the Catholic Church and emerging Protestants, leading to the Thirty Years’ War, violence in multiple European countries between religious factions, in England, a years of civil wars that erupted in 1642.  Violence was commonly used across centuries to force change from one religion inseparable from government to another religion also inseparable from government.  

Efforts to establish and maintain one dominant religion were shattered in 1791 when the Bill of Rights amendments were ratified.  The First Amendment states:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The 1791 ratification of the Bill of Rights created a precedent for separating religion from control of the government, as was common in Europe. But now there are those who want to establish religion in American as a partner of government.

More than 600 scrolls originally buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. could contain potential treasures from the time ranging from unread poems by Greek poet Sappho to early Christian philosophy. But, as of yet, we can’t read them because the scrolls are charred shut.

Researchers hope that the use of artificial intelligence—and the incentive of $250,000 in prize money—will unlock insight into the contents of two specific scrolls.

NPR interviewed Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond about his new book, Poverty, by America. Desmond says that we can afford to eliminate poverty, if we want to. Income inequality is a driving force behind disinvestment in public services, he says.

Over 11% of the U.S. population — about one in nine people — lived below the federal poverty line in 2021. But Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond says neither that statistic, nor the federal poverty line itself, encapsulate the full picture of economic insecurity in America.

“There’s plenty of poverty above the poverty line as a lived experience,” Desmond says. “About one in three Americans live in a household that’s making $55,000 or less, and many of those folks aren’t officially considered poor. But what else do you call trying to raise three kids in Portland on $55,000?”

It was a glass half-full situation on March 22, 2023 when Relativity Space carried out the first successful launch of an almost entirely 3D-printed rocket from Launch Complex 16 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 11:23 pm EDT. Though the liftoff was successful and the first stage…

This is the transcript from a video I offered at the press conference for the Internet Archive, held on the day the case went to trial. Read more about the case here.

We should all recognize — and celebrate—the importance of commercial publishing, for authors and creators everywhere. Commercial publishing creates the income that authors depend upon to have the freedom to create great new works. Without commercial publishing, much of the greatest that will be won’t be written.

But we must also recognize that culture needs more than commercial publishing. If the business model of commercial publishing controlled our access to our past, then much of who we were, and much of how we learned to be better, would simply disappear.

Think about the extraordinary platform that is Netflix.

Utah Governor Spencer Cox signed a bill into law Thursday that would impose sweeping restrictions that aim to curtal kid and teen use of social media apps such as Instagram and TikTok.