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GOP funding cuts mean that more children will grow up with the lifelong implications of untreated illnesses.
Frank Gehry, the world-famous architect, has died at 96 years old. The designer of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles also left his mark on the Massachusetts architecture scene with two recognizable buildings in the Boston area. Gehry designed the Ray and Maria Stata Center, a quirky looking building on the MIT campus in Cambridge that opened in 2004.
Poverty Point, a 3,500-year-old earthen mound located in Louisiana, continues to puzzle archaeologists and historians.
From Oklahoma to Indiana to Alabama, state schools are bending over backward—suspending student magazines and even disciplining instructors—to preemptively satisfy the Trump administration.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration gutted the Institute of Museum and Library Services, leading to canceled federal grants. Now, after a court order, those grants are being reinstated.
The Dells' $6.25 billion investment in Trump Accounts for American children raises questions about benefiting the wealthy vs. struggling families. Will this truly help kids' futures, or is it just a PR move by billionaires? Shouldn't public investment in education and healthcare be prioritized over private donations? #TrumpAccounts
PLYMOUTH – Officials with the Plymouth Patuxet Museums say residents will be able to get a glimpse of the Mayflower II Friday as it makes its journey south for Mystic Seaport Museum. The ship…
Recently, opinion pieces in mainstream media outlets have begun speculating that education policy will be an important factor in the 2026 midterm elections, and that Republicans are owning the Democrats on the issue. In October, The New York Times pundit David Brooks urged Democrats to reprise bipartisan policy ideas from the Clinton-Bush-Obama years of governing schools based on how their students scored on standardized tests. Drawing from recent assessments that show test score gains in a few Southern states, Brooks concluded, “the party that dominates the rural areas [i.e., Republicans] has a proven educational agenda while the party that dominates the urban areas [Democrats] doesn’t.” Similarly, in The Hill, Ben Austin, a former campaign staffer for Kamala Harris, lamented that Democrats “have lost their way” on education, because “it is politically untenable for Democrats to oppose all forms of school choice when Republicans are offering a free market smorgasbord of choice.” What these commentators ignore are the results of a quiet revolution in blue states—and a few red states—that are implementing a school improvement plan commonly called the community school approach.
Long before they became symbols of climate change, polar bears helped shape Charles Darwin’s revolutionary ideas about how species adapt to their environments. As any good high school student should know, the beaks of Galápagos “finches” (in fact, the islands’ mockingbirds) helped Darwin to develop his ideas about evolution. But few people realize that the polar bear, too, informed his grand theory.
Letting his fancy run wild in On the Origin of Species, the man accustomed to thinking in eons hypothesized “a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale.” Darwin based this speculation on a black bear the fur trader-explorer Samuel Hearne had observed swimming for hours, its mouth wide open, catching insects in the water. If the supply of insects were constant, Darwin thought, and no better-adapted competitors were present, such a species could well take shape over time.
There is a place in Turkey where strange vapors issue from the ground, which ancient Greco-Roman people used in their rituals to the gods of the underworld. The place, known as Pluto’s Gate, is very much a deadly portal between two worlds. The temple was built with a gateway and surrounding arena that led into the cave itself. Visitors were forbidden to enter the interior, but they could sit on raised seats and observe the priests at work. At sunrise, these agents of the divine would lead bulls through the arena towards the gate and watch as the animal struggled and quickly died while the priests remained unharmed. The visitors could even take part in this grisly ritual themselves. They could buy small animals and birds (the proceeds of which supported the temple’s upkeep in the same way a modern museum gift shop might) which they would then release into the arena. Upon entering, the animals would succumb to the Hadean breath of death – leaving the onlookers mystified and awestruck.
A Pressing Issues conversation with State Rep. Chris Rabb about two new local-news bills
BOSTON – With temperatures dropping, the New England Aquarium has announced that it is already treating hundreds of hypothermic sea turtles washing up on state beaches. Since November 7…
In the Orkney Islands, where megalithic monuments remain a fundamental part of the landscape, archeologists have been uncovering remarkable ruins, Alex Ross reports.
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From 400-year-old globes to cosmic funeral shrouds, how the Osher Map Library in Maine shows people that maps aren't just for navigation — but windows into history, culture, and how we see the world.
BOSTON – The New England Aquarium says researchers have discovered that a North Atlantic right whale recently sighted in Massachusetts waters is the same individual reported off Ireland last year, …
Education program sponsored by Shell’s Queensland Gas Company is ‘climate obstruction dressed up as education’, advocacy group says
A federal appeals court on Thursday halted an effort by the Trump administration to block grants to hire more school mental health workers. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied the administration’s appeal of a district court decision to restore grants given by the Biden administration to hire more counselors and social workers, particularly in low-income and rural schools. The appeals court ruled the Trump administration has not shown a strong likelihood of success and noted the district court is likely to reach a final decision soon. The Hill has reached out to the Education Department for comment. The Trump administration is fighting these grants because it opposes some diversity, equity, and inclusion aspects in the programs and is trying to cut off funding after this month.
Do you take sugar in your asteroid? Furukawa, Yoshihiro et al. “Bio-essential sugars in samples from asteroid Bennu.” Nature Geoscience. Scientists have found bio-essential sugars, including ribose and glucose, in samples of an asteroid called Bennu that were brought to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission in 2023. The discovery marks the first time key sugars have been found in any extraterrestrial sample. Ribose is an essential ingredient of RNA (ribonucleic acid), making it a particularly significant find in the quest to understand how life arose on Earth, and if it exists elsewhere. https://youtu.be/9LyH6jTefU8?si=CU3rVmPEzTbPf5oK “All five of the canonical nucleobases in DNA and RNA, and phosphate, were previously found in Bennu samples,” said researchers led by Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University. “Our detection of ribose means that all the components of RNA are present in Bennu.”
President Trump has claimed for months that his administration and Harvard University were close to a monumental deal to end his extraordinary pressure campaign against the university. Even some at Harvard say that a deal appeared imminent this summer. But eight months after the rupture between Harvard and the government blew open, no deal has materialized. “Negotiations are proceeding and productive,” said Madi Biedermann, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, in a statement to The New York Times this week. The talks, though, have stumbled around arguments about where any money will go. Harvard has been open to spending $500 million on work-force training programs. But Trump officials have recently argued that some of the money should be paid directly to the federal government, a proposal that has not been previously reported. The idea has caused Harvard officials to balk, according to six Harvard and Trump administration officials and others familiar with the negotiations. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
About 7,000 years ago, two women were laid to rest in a rocky shelter in today’s southwestern Libya. Their remains have now yielded the first ancient human genomes ever recovered from the central Sahara. An international study finds that these women carried a long isolated North African lineage now erased as a separate group. Their DNA also helps redraw the map of how people moved, or did not move, across a greener Sahara. The work was led by Nada Salem, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPIEA) in Germany. Her research focuses on using ancient DNA, genetic material recovered from long dead organisms, to reconstruct population history in Africa. Pollen and lake records show that between roughly 14,500 and 5,000 years ago, northern Africa was much wetter than today. Researchers call this the African Humid Period. The Takarkori rock shelter sits in the Tadrart Acacus Mountains, overlooking what used to be a lush savanna dotted with small lakes.
Wilson Bentley, a self-taught farmer in Vermont, captured thousands of snowflakes on film, revealing their intricate designs and leaving a lasting legacy in meteorology and the study of nature’s frozen wonders. In 1885, at the age of 20, Wilson Alwyn Bentley, a farmer who would live all his life in the small town of Jericho in Vermont, gave the world its first ever photograph of a snowflake. Over the following winters until he died in 1931, Bentley captured over 5,000 snowflakes, or more accurately, snow crystals, on film. Although he rarely left Jericho, thousands of Americans knew him as “The Snowflake Man” or simply “Snowflake Bentley.” Our belief that “no two snowflakes are alike” stems from a line in a 1925 report in which he remarked: “Every crystal was a masterpiece of design, and no one design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost.” It started with a microscope his mother gave him when he was 15. A lover of winter, he made plans to use his microscope to view snowflakes. His initial investigations proved both fascinating and frustrating as he tried to observe the short-lived flakes. So that he could share his discoveries, he began by sketching what he saw, accumulating several hundred sketches by his 17th birthday. When his father purchased a camera for him, Bentley combined it with his microscope and, on January 15, 1885, made his first successful photomicrograph of a snow crystal.
Researchers from the Canadian Museum of Nature (CMN) have identified a new species of rhino that once roamed Canada's High Arctic 23 million years ago. The extinct rhinoceros, described in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, is the northernmost rhino known to have ever walked the planet — and it's already reshaping scientists' understanding of when many ancient animals spread across the continents. While there are only five rhino species alive today, the fossil record suggests that in the past, well over 50 species may have walked the Earth. Back then, rhinoceroses occupied not just Asia and Africa, but also Europe and North America — and they came in all shapes and sizes. That's certainly the case for the newly named rhino now known as Epiatheracerium itjilik.
60+ public schools across the region, including those in Bourne, Falmouth, Barnstable, Mashpee, Nauset, Provincetown, and the Monomoy Regional School District, as well as New Bedford Vocational Tech and Lower Cape Tech, rely on OpenCape’s 100% Fiber Optic Network to meet the demands of modern classrooms. With Multi-Gig Internet, these schools can keep up with today’s teaching tools and the growing need for reliable, high-speed connectivity.
The Senate’s plan to address the school choice voucher system’s shortfalls was made public Friday. “A myriad of accountability problems” went on display this week when two legislative committees reacted to an independent audit showing “funding did not follow the child” to private schools or homeschool. Now, Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Crestview, has put out his […]
Worried about too many screens in the classroom, a small but growing number of parents are getting so fed up they’re switching to low-tech private schools — or even pulling their kids out and opting to homeschool them, analog style. “The school didn’t want to provide paper,” said Erica Frans, a mother in Kansas who says she decided to homeschool her fifth-grade daughter back in 2020, after watching her randomly guess the answer to math questions on a computer program.
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Scoop.it!
