When Pepper the social robot was given the chance to try its hand as a teaching assistant, it showed that it can be even better than a human teacher at motivating pupils and helping them learn.

In a meeting room at the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, a Chinese film poster flickers onto a large screen. Haiqing Lin, the library's head of technical services, is demonstrating an interface he built. With a few practiced clicks, he sends the image—one of 2,000 posters from the Paul Fonoroff collection—through an artificial intelligence model. Seconds later, a draft catalog description appears.

Zoos offer people the opportunity to experience animals and engage with the natural world. Alongside recreation, they also play important roles in species conservation and scientific research. Education is another core mission of modern zoos, with many programs designed to foster a stronger sense of connection to nature. But how effective are these initiatives? And which visitors benefit most from guided tours, workshops or multi-day educational programs?

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.