A school for low-income students cofounded by Mark Zuckerberg’s wife, Priscilla Chan, has officially shut its doors.
The tuition-free school in the heart of Silicon Valley, simply called The Primary School, was forced to close after Chan’s philanthropy fund, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, announced last year it was no longer going to fund it at the end of the 2025-2026 school year.
As the Wall Street Journal reports, the unfortunate development highlights how some of the most influential minds in the tech industry are shifting their priorities from supporting the tackling of social issues and — as the story goes — toward scientific research instead.
Still, it’s difficult to fathom considering Zuckerberg and his wife’s obscene levels of wealth. Zuckerberg’s net worth alone is just shy of $200 billion, making him the sixth richest person in the world, according to Bloomberg‘s Billionaire Index. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative had funneled more than $125 million into The Primary School over a decade — barely a footnote in the power couple’s balance sheet.
The families of those enrolled in the school were devastated by the news.
“It was a godsend school,” the mother of a girl who won a lottery spot in the school’s first class told the WSJ, describing the closure as “crushing.”
The local Ravenswood City Elementary School District is now preparing to put up portable trailers to deal with the influx of over 500 children looking to stay in school ahead of the start of the next academic year, according to the newspaper.
As far as billionaire tech CEO-funded philanthropic efforts go, The Primary School sounded like a well-meaning attempt to help children escape the poverty trap and overcome associated traumas.
Staff sought out children with learning disabilities and behavioral issues. The majority of students didn’t speak English at home.
But as the WSJ reports, running the school proved extremely difficult. The privately-funded institution struggled to find the right curriculum and policies, leading to frequent principal turnover.
Donors also balked at funding the school.
“Why would you give money to an entity being funded by one of the wealthiest people in the world?” the school’s former board president Jean-Claude Brizard told the newspaper.
As of November, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has shut down support for almost everything but science, as Science reported last year, while aligning itself with the Trump administration’s politics, including the gutting of its diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility team.
Given Zuckerberg’s Meta recent doubling down by committing over $130 billion to AI spending, that philanthropic pivot to scientific research shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The couple has pledged the majority of their initiative’s $200 billion fund on biomedical research — and AI, of course.
More on the Zuckerbergs: Zuckerberg Trying to Simulate Human Biology at the Cellular Level
The post Mark Zuckerberg’s Wife Shuts Down School for the Disadvantaged appeared first on Futurism.
In the Bolivian Altiplano, fewer Aymara farmers are relying on local weather knowledge to schedule farming tasks, like choosing the best dates to plant crops and predicting a frost or drought. At the same time, there is growing doubt about whether these traditional indicators remain relevant today in the context of rapid social, economic, and climatic changes.
Farmers are struggling because the National Weather Service of Bolivia (SEHNAMI) fails to provide useful weather forecasts due to the geographical complexity of the Andes and a scarcity of weather stations. In addition, many farmers can’t access this information because SEHNAMI lacks local outreach programs to deliver reports directly to them. In a region with a weak technical forecasting system, local knowledge is a vital resource, but its use is declining.
Scientists in the past focused on preserving local weather knowledge or discussing how it might help communities adapt to climate change. However, very few researchers have scientifically validated local weather indicators, since doing so requires many years of historical meteorological data to establish statistical “skill” in local forecasting.
Faced with this gap, researchers in the US and Bolivia recently set out to validate indigenous indicators in 2 Bolivian municipalities: Umala in the Central Altiplano and Ancoraimes in the Northern Altiplano. To do this, they paired each traditional weather sign with a measurable variable, like temperature, that could approximate it. This approach allowed them to directly compare traditional observations with scientific data.
The researchers wanted to determine whether traditional weather knowledge is still accurate and relevant under current conditions, since validating these methods would strengthen local knowledge and benefit the schools and policies that promote it. To test this, the researchers worked with 6 Aymara communities. First, they conducted workshops with local leaders and experts to compile a set of weather-forecast indicators. Then, they surveyed 95 farmers to rank the reliability of these indicators.
Through discussions with these communities, the team identified 13 weather indicators in the Central region and 20 in the Northern region. These indicators included specific plants, animals, and physical factors like constellations or winds that the farmers used to decide when and where to plant crops, and to predict weather conditions for the next season. The researchers focused on 2 key indicators that the farmers ranked as most reliable: the presence or absence of moisture under rocks on the Fiesta de San Juan on June 24th, and the flowering patterns of specific plants, called Thola and Sank’ayu. The farmers used the San Juan indicator to predict whether the upcoming year would be rainy or dry, and the plants to determine the most favorable dates for planting to avoid agricultural risks like frosts.
Finally, the researchers compared forecasts based on these 2 signs with over 30 years of meteorological data from nearby weather stations. In both cases, they used the minimum daily temperature as the measurable way to represent these local signs scientifically. Their results showed that the minimum daily temperature on the Fiesta de San Juan could explain more than half (55.5%) of the changes in rainfall during the growing season. They also confirmed that severe frosts that “burned” Thola and Sank’ayuthe flowers were followed by periods without rain, validating the farmers’ strategy of delayed planting.
The researchers concluded that local weather indicators used by Aymara farmers are most reliable for seasonal planning, especially in predicting the start of the rainy season. They stated that this result helps legitimize traditional knowledge and empower the community. For example, these communities now hold regular meetings to discuss forecasts and share this information with their neighbors via WhatsApp groups.
However, the team acknowledged that local knowledge was limited to short-term forecasting, as it only provided warnings a few hours in advance. Farmers need alerts several days in advance to effectively reduce their vulnerability to events such as frosts or hail. For this reason, the researchers suggested that the next step will be to co-produce forecasts by combining meteorological science with traditional knowledge.
The post Testing local weather knowledge in the Bolivian Altiplano appeared first on Sciworthy.
The Jason Arday scandal is just the latest symptom of a much bigger problem in UK universities: collapsing standards, poor scholarship and a system that has let it happen, says Dr David McGrogan.
The post Bloody Awful Work Creeps in When Standards Are Relaxed appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Who could’ve guessed that students who use AI to cheat on their assignments are incredibly lazy?
Jason Gibson, a history professor at Alcorn State University in Mississippi, says that he used white font to hide a prompt telling an AI model to spew nonsense in the instructions for his mid-term.
Unfortunately, it ended up working a little too well.
“Thirty-two of my 35 students between two classes failed a portion of their midterm because they all used AI to generate their entire response,” he explained in a viral TikTok, sounding incredulous. “And apparently they didn’t proofread it.”
The hidden prompt told the AI to sneak in random digressions about Madagascar. The midterm, by the way, was about the Industrial Revolution. And apparently none of the indolent cheats put in the bare modicum of effort required to at least check if what the AI wrote made any sense at all. All they did was copy-paste the midterm instructions into a chatbot, then copy-paste the chatbot’s spiel back into the answer window.
Gibson shared some of the most examples in a follow-up video. After introducing how AI and other technologies have impacted society, for instance, one midterm included this puzzling non sequitur: “Madagascar floats sideways through the afternoon.” (“Okay,” Gibson says, after a pause.)
Another droned on about something related to AI and social inequality, followed by: “Madagascar purple bicycle whispers to the ceiling.”
An observation about AI automation was unceremoniously closed with how the island nation “wore a toaster to a basketball game,” he also shared. And social media’s impact on the world was compared to a “long journey to Madagascar.”
Gibson makes it clear that humiliating his students wasn’t the point. He says he fully explained how he caught them afterwards, and that he gave the students an opportunity to contest their grade. (Only two did, showing at least that they do feel shame.)
“I get no gratification out of seeing students fail. It’s not my intent to see you fail — that’s weird,” he said.
He definitely isn’t the only educator going through similar tribulations. Teachers and professors across the country are constantly complaining that their pupils are using AI to generate essays and cheat on tests. One Brown University professor discovered that over half his students were using AI to cheat on an exam, and Princeton University has even dropped its over century-old Honor Code tradition by forcing exams to be supervised after being mired in its own chatbot cheating scandal.
“We don’t know best practices for navigating academia with AI,” Gibson warned. “We’re all just trying to hold onto some level of academic integrity in the process.”
More on AI: Law School Bans Laptops and Phones as AI Cheating Scandal Grows
The post Professor Hides White Font in Midterm, Catches Students Using AI in the Stupidest Way Possible appeared first on Futurism.
The EHRC has released new trans schools guidance on how to comply with the Equality Act. But from changing rooms to pronoun use it puts children at risk, says Caroline Ffiske.
The post The EHRC’s New Trans Schools Guidance Puts Children at Risk appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
For years, the conventional wisdom for ambitious students and languishing jobseekers alike was “learn to code.” Do that, the ubiquitous advice went, and you’d be able to find yourself a six-figure job anywhere.
But in an age when bosses are hellbent on using powerful AI agents to perform the duties of software engineers, that advice is now looking increasingly obsolete, if not outright backfiring. And the youngsters appear to be getting wise to that new reality.
For the first time in nearly twenty years, computer science enrollment declined during the 2025-26 academic year, according to new research from the Stanford economist Jacob Light reported by Business Insider.
A separate survey from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center found that undergraduate enrollment in another IT degree, computer and information sciences and support services, dropped by a precipitous 8.1 percent in the fall of 2025.
Light said that the dropoff could be related to AI, and not necessarily a direct result of AI taking over coding jobs.
“The decline could reflect changes in the education production function as generative AI alters how students complete coursework, changes in students’ expectations about the returns to Computer Science skills, responses to labor market conditions that themselves partly reflect AI adoption, broader weakness in the technology labor market unrelated to AI, or other contemporaneous shifts in student demand,” Light wrote, per BI.
“Therefore, I treat the enrollment patterns as descriptive evidence rather than as an estimate of the causal effect of ChatGPT or AI exposure on student demand,” he concluded.
There’s probably nuance under the hood. When The Washington Post dived into the National Student Clearinghouse data earlier this year, its analysis suggested that some of those disappearing computer science enrollments are being funneled into related disciplines instead, like data analytics and data science.
In any case, it’s clear that programming jobs, at least in big tech, aren’t as secure as they used to be. Over 120,000 tech jobs have been cut in 2026 so far, according to the industry layoffs trackers Layoffs.fyi. A significant portion came at companies like Meta and Google as they ramped up their AI spending.
One report found that AI was cited in the announcements of more than 54,000 layoffs last year. Whether AI meaningfully replaced those jobs or was simply used as a scapegoat by employers to gloss over other reasons for the cuts, though, is a matter of ongoing debate.
More on AI: Sixteen Nobel-Winning Economists Warn That Major AI Job Losses Are Coming
The post Computer Science Enrollment Now Declining Under Dark Cloud of AI appeared first on Futurism.
Australia risks ‘shipping’ intellectual capability overseas if educational rigour not restored, experts warn
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An academic at the Australian National University has accused it of a “hysterical” response to students using AI to cheat, as tertiary institutions rush to shore up the credibility of assessments.
But a colleague warned Australia is in danger of “shipping our national intellectual capability” to companies in California and China if educational rigour is not restored.
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© Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP
© Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP
© Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP
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