First, Neanderthal males had lots more babies with human females than human males had with Neanderthal females. What’s up with that?! Then, strap in for a stellar swan song, antlers for breakfast, and a timeless style icon from the Cretaceous.

A new genetic analysis reveals that human females and Neanderthal males interbred far more than the reverse, for reasons that remain mysterious.

The schools in Steubenville, Ohio, are doing something unusual—in fact, it’s almost unheard of. In a country where nearly 40 percent of fourth graders struggle to read at even a basic level, Steubenville has succeeded in teaching virtually all of its students to read well. 

According to data from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, Steubenville has routinely scored in the top 10 percent or better of schools nationwide for third-grade reading, sometimes scoring as high as the top 1 percent.

In study after study for decades, researchers have found that districts serving low-income families almost always have lower test scores than districts in more affluent places. Yet Steubenville bucks that trend.

“It was astonishing to me how amazing that elementary school was,” said Karin Chenoweth, who wrote about Steubenville in her book How It’s Being Done: Urgent Lessons From Unexpected Schools.

"Grasping at the Roots" is a film that is a love letter to the Black Environmental Justice movement This Documentary is a Beacon of Hope.

As temperatures and tensions rise around us, Grasping at the Roots is a chance to follow some of the people who are making positive change in Black Environmental Justice communities.

It is a window into the lives of those being hit by economic hardships, community disruptions, and climate change: living next to refineries and other industrial projects while bearing the brunt of a warming climate, and doing something about it.

This 35 minute film is an opportunity to learn from people building solutions to the issues their communities face. Those who come from a long legacy of fighting for their lives and rights.

This isn’t just a documentary. It’s a call to action.

When Neanderthals and modern humans first got together, they preferred pairings between Neanderthal men and human women, a new study of ancient and modern genomes suggests.

The finding helps to explain why modern humans (Homo sapiens) have a relatively low level of Neanderthal genes and why those genes are found in some populations today and not in others.

In 1871, Ku Klux Klan violence in South Carolina got so bad that the governor sent a telegram to President Ulysses S. Grant warning that he was facing a state of war.

Grant sent him Amos Akerman: a former Confederate soldier and slaveholder who became the U.S. government’s most zealous warrior against the KKK.

Guests:

Bernard Powers, director of the Center for the Study of Slavery in Charleston at the College of Charleston in South Carolina

Guy Gugliotta, author of "Grant's Enforcer, Taking Down the Klan"

Kidada Williams, professor of history at Wayne State University and author of "I Saw Death Coming, A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction"

To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.

The International Space Station is set to deorbit in 2030, and sociologist Paola Castaño-Rodriguez discusses whether private space station replacements can fill the scientific gap.

When the International Space Station plunges to its fiery doom in 2030, its loss to science will be incalculable, even if it remains an open question as to whether its successes matched humanity's ambitions for it.

By the time that the International Space Station (ISS) is safely and deliberately de-orbited over the Pacific Ocean, the station will have been permanently crewed for 30 years — it has had visitors ever since the first Expedition 1 mission (consisting of one astronaut and two cosmonauts) first docked with the fledgling, half-built station on November 2, 2000. Yet as we begin to near the end of the ISS's time in low Earth orbit, we are beginning to think ever more about the station's true legacy, whether it achieved what it set out to achieve, and what we will lose when it is finally gone.

The loss of the ISS will be keenly felt by many; it will be like when one of our beloved Mars rovers falters and is forced to end its mission. Sure, there will be other Mars rovers after, but they will be different. There will be other space stations, but they will be different.

For some, though, says sociologist Paola Castaño-Rodriguez of the University of Exeter, the end of the ISS will be no loss at all, as they always saw it as a white elephant.

Dozens of juvenile detention centers in 25 states reported holding children weeks or months as they awaited space at long-term psychiatric treatment facilities, according to a new survey.

"Prolonged Incarceration of Children Due to Mental Health Care Shortages," released Thursday by the staff of Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff and Republican Rep. Jen Kiggans, is based on a survey sent to administrators of public juvenile detention facilities around the country. About half of those who responded to the survey reported they had, at some point, kept children incarcerated when they could have been released into offsite mental health care.

"This should shock America's conscience," Ossoff says. "Children with special needs, locked up for extended time instead of getting the mental health care that they need."

New America's Zahava Stadler and Jeremy Bauer-Wolf explore why the Department of Education was created, why it’s under threat, and what its loss could mean.

When President Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education, he saw it as a path toward stronger public schools and greater opportunity. Decades later, the Trump administration’s push to dismantle it raises new questions about the federal role in education.

From small art schools to large public universities, the new DOJ release of emails reveals just how deep the financier’s influence in academia went. Students are demanding accountability.

A newly discovered species of large dinosaur lived in marshy areas, hunted for fish and had an impressive horn protruding from its skull. It is the first time in over 100 years that scientists have discovered a new species of Spinosaurus dinosaurs, which are large fish-eating predators that first emerged during the Jurassic period more than 140 million years ago.

The new species, called Spinosaurus mirabilis, was the length of a school bus and was unearthed in Niger by an international team of scientists led by paleontologists from the University of Chicago. Details of the discovery were published in the journal Science last week.

Just a few years ago, historian and activist Ibram X. Kendi seemed to be everywhere. At the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, he became one of the leading voices on racism in America—and particularly what he described as antiracism. In 2019, his book How to Be an Antiracist became a bestseller. And later, just months after the death of George Floyd—a Black man killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis—Kendi founded the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, receiving $55 million in funding.

But over the last few years, as a backlash grew against the BLM movement, Kendi also came under attack. His ideas urging people to be actively antiracist were often the target of conservative critics fighting against DEI policies and the teaching of critical race theory. Kendi was also accused of mismanaging the antiracism center at BU, which laid off much of its staff before closing last year. (BU cleared Kendi of financial mismanagement.) Kendi now leads another academic project, this time at Howard University’s Institute for Advanced Study, that focuses on racism and the global African diaspora. And next month, Kendi will release a new book called Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age, which examines what’s known as the “great replacement theory” and its links to authoritarian regimes around the world. 

EdTech digitized the classroom and extended the reach of the university. It enabled hybrid learning, scaled access and modernized operations. But it was fundamentally application-centric. Value was trapped inside systems. Data sat in siloes. Interoperability was hard-won and often brittle. The architecture centralized not only control, but friction.

That architecture is reaching its limits.

In its place, we see the emergence of TechEd: a fluid, interoperable ecosystem powered by APIs, federated data, machine learning and natural language understanding. In TechEd, applications give way to platforms. Workflows give way to agents. Data becomes a river, not a lake.

Most importantly, TechEd starts with the learner.

AI can transform how students learn — but it can be overwhelming for educators to master this new technology on top of their already demanding workloads. Existing AI training initiatives often require hours of time, and they don’t always clearly show how teachers can use what they’ve learned to help their students. We believe that for AI to be truly impactful in schools, educators need to lead the way.

That’s why Google for Education is launching a landmark initiative with ISTE+ASCD to provide free, comprehensive Gemini training to all 6 million K-12 and higher education faculty in the U.S. It’s the largest initiative of its kind, designed to help these educators and their over 74 million students safely and thoughtfully use Google’s suite of AI tools - including Gemini and NotebookLM - to thrive in a world where AI is becoming more prevalent.

For seven years, she ran high-security nuclear simulations for the US government. Now, this famous supercomputer is being put to death.

It was the government that decided it was time for Sierra to die. Sierra, it must be said, was a supercomputer, and so had never really been alive in the first place. But by any objective measure, she lived an impressive life. She resided in northern California at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where she was minded by dozens of staff at the lab’s computing complex, in Building 453. She completed her final jobs late last year, in October, before she went offline for good. She was 7 years old.

According to the TOP500, which ranks these mega-machines, Sierra was once the second-fastest supercomputer in the world. She was conceived in a Chicago hotel conference room more than a decade ago, at a technical discussion for officials from America’s national labs. The ultimate designer baby, Sierra was assembled from thousands of IBM Power9 CPUs and Nvidia Volta V100 GPUs—a daring, offbeat architecture for Livermore at the time.

Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell lavished money on the Interlochen Center for the Arts to gain access, documents show. In the process, two teenagers were pulled into their orbit.

NPR listeners share how they've made relationships with their neighbors and community. Many of them, through parties, potlucks and coffees, say they've made the first move.

How did you build your village? We asked NPR's audience this question in our newsletter in January, inspired by Life Kit's interview with Priya Parker on how to create community.

The key is to start imagining the community you might want to live in and then take steps to make that a reality, says Parker, a conflict resolution facilitator and the author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

Many of our readers have done just that. We received dozens of responses from folks who've found creative ways to make lasting connections where they live.

Keeping students off their devices is the new norm in many schools. We talked to students and educators at one Kentucky school to see how it's working.

How do you get teenagers to put their phones away for hours at a time? That is the question many schools are trying to solve as bans on cellphones sweep the U.S. — more than 30 states so far now restrict their use during the school day.

One of those states is Kentucky, where all public school classes must now be cellphone free. Districts can set their own policies to achieve that goal. Some collect phones at the start of each class; others allow students to have them only during their lunch period.

The Jefferson County school district, which includes Louisville, set a "bell-to-bell" policy, opting to keep students phone free from the moment they walk in the building until they leave at the end of the day.