All posts tagged: students

Obama and Mamdani read and sing with Bronx pre-K students

Obama and Mamdani read and sing with Bronx pre-K students

Former President Barack Obama and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani met face-to-face for the first time during a visit to a Bronx child care center on Saturday, a moment that underscores the growing national attention surrounding Mamdani’s tenure. The two appeared together at a pre-K site in the Bronx, where they read to children and highlighted the importance of early childhood education. While both had previously commented publicly following Mamdani’s election, the event marked their first in-person meeting. Mamdani’s rise to the mayor’s office has drawn significant attention beyond New York, with national Democrats closely watching how his leadership and policy priorities unfold. His election was widely viewed as a notable political moment, reflecting shifting dynamics within the city and the broader party. Obama, who has remained active in public life since leaving office, has frequently emphasized education as a cornerstone of economic opportunity in his entire political and post-political career. He has also signaled a more direct role in Mamdani’s early tenure, indicating he would serve as a sounding board for the new …

Undergraduate students built a cavity detector to search for axion dark matter

Undergraduate students built a cavity detector to search for axion dark matter

Dark matter is supposed to be everywhere, threaded through the Milky Way and outnumbering ordinary matter by a wide margin. Yet after decades of effort, nobody has caught it directly. That gap between certainty and absence has helped turn modern cosmology into a field of giant machines, giant budgets and giant collaborations. So there is something striking about a recent axion search that went in the opposite direction. A team of then-undergraduate students at the University of Hamburg built a compact cavity detector. They ran it inside a powerful magnet and used it to probe one narrow slice of the dark matter problem. They did not find a signal. However, what they did find was a way to rule out axions with certain properties in that range. This tightened the map for future searches and showed that careful, smaller-scale physics can still leave a mark on one of science’s biggest mysteries. The work, now published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, focused on axions, hypothetical particles long considered one of the strongest candidates …

A rural college uses ancient Islamic archives to reconnect students to African legacy

A rural college uses ancient Islamic archives to reconnect students to African legacy

(RNS) — In a former segregated school in rural Virginia, an Islamic college has been reconnecting its mostly African American Muslim students with a legacy of faith and scholarship largely erased from mainstream history.  IQOU Theological College, in the town of Charlotte Court House, for the past two years has housed a small, borrowed collection of ancient manuscripts from the West African city of Timbuktu in Mali, a center of Islamic learning that thrived between the 13th and 17th centuries. It’s also a region where many Africans were kidnapped during the transatlantic slave trade.  Hafiz Hassan Ali Qadri, a Quran teacher at the college, said the 17 manuscripts can offer African American Muslims a concrete link to a part of their ancestors’ history. Seeing handwritten works on law, theology, astronomy and other subjects challenges an enduring narrative that enslaved Africans arrived in the United States with little education or scholarly traditions, he said. “It goes full circle, showing that this is where we came from — we came from knowledge,” Qadri said. “And what we’re …

Chicago Public School Students Automatically Granted Library Access, and More Library News

Chicago Public School Students Automatically Granted Library Access, and More Library News

It’s another week and another roundup of updates to keep you at the top of your library game. We’ve got a pair of big updates on the Institution of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) legal fight, a great partnership between Chicago’s public libraries and public schools, the best April new releases, an author who has finally revealed the true identity behind their pseudonym, and more. Let’s dive in. Source link

Free Microsoft 365 Premium and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for students — but is it better than a MacBook Neo?

Free Microsoft 365 Premium and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for students — but is it better than a MacBook Neo?

SAVE $625: College students can score one year of Microsoft 365 Premium, one year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, and a Xbox Wireless Controller totally free with the purchase of a Windows 11 laptop. With the arrival of Apple’s MacBook Neo, college students can rejoice in an affordable, colorful laptop. Now, Microsoft is rushing to make their laptops a little more enticing to the college crowd. They’re doing a pretty good job with the ultimate college bundle. With the purchase of a new Windows 11 laptop, students score one year of Microsoft 365 Premium and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, plus a free Xbox wireless controller. That’s $624.86 worth of product that students get completely free. Microsoft 365 Premium is usually $199.99 for a one-year subscription, and includes access to all the essential Microsoft apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It also features cloud storage and advanced security to keep your papers organized and safe. But college shouldn’t be all work and no play. For some well-earned downtime, one year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is …

Microsoft’s Windows 11 laptop deal for students comes with a 0 bonus – what’s included

Microsoft’s Windows 11 laptop deal for students comes with a $500 bonus – what’s included

Kyle Kucharski/ZDNET Microsoft has a brand-new offer for college students: When you buy a new Windows 11 laptop (from Microsoft, Amazon, Best Buy, or Walmart), you’ll get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate included, along with a customizable Xbox controller — a value of more than $500, free. You can choose a qualifying Windows PC from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, or Surface. (To help you choose, check out our tested picks for the best laptops overall, and the best Windows laptops.) Also: The best Windows laptops of 2026: Expert tested and reviewed This Microsoft College Offer includes the following with your eligible PC purchase, for US students:  12 months of Microsoft 365 Premium: Access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and more, with CoPilot built in for AI assistance 12 months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate: Access to a library of hundreds of games, including new games on day one like Forza Horizon 6 and Fable, that you can play on PC, Xbox, and more devices with unlimited cloud gaming. A …

Berklee College of Music Students Furious That It’s Offering an AI “Songwriting” Class

Berklee College of Music Students Furious That It’s Offering an AI “Songwriting” Class

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Hundreds of students at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston have signed an online petition protesting a new course on generative AI music and songwriting, marking another salvo in the continuing battle between artists and a technology they believe is stealing their hope for a livelihood. As of Tuesday, 418 people have signed the petition, which is targeting the two-credit course “Bots and Beats: AI and the Future of Songwriting” and calling for the school to stop leveraging AI on campus. The petition accuses the school of promoting OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which “steal the art of [tens of thousands] of artists and rot the essence of the industry and have devastating consequences on the environment all to create facsimiles of real human art,” the petition’s organizers wrote. Angry comments from current and former students filled the discussion area of the petition, with many expressing disappointment that a school known for fostering the creation of popular music has …

Standing Up for the Rights of Students Who Are Different

Standing Up for the Rights of Students Who Are Different

My name is Antonio Castillo. I am a humanist, a father, and a middle school teacher. I was born and raised in Brownsville, in the Rio Grande Valley – deep South Texas. I started teaching in 2001, moving between a few major cities over 25 years, before finally deciding to come back home. My family is progressive, for the most part, and Catholic. That makes them part of the majority religion in the Brownsville area. Protestants are in the minority, as well as Muslims, and humanists like myself. Despite my not practicing a majority religion, my activism had always been met with acceptance. Back in 2015, I led a small diverse group of Rio Grande Valley residents in a campaign to remove confederate monuments and rename a local college building. The group had Catholics, Muslims, and a few other atheists and humanists like myself. I was respected there, and the campaign was successful. As an educator and an activist, I don’t just teach – I take the time to stand up for the kids who …

Trump’s Higher Education Crackdown: Visa Revocations, DEI Bans, Lawsuits and Funding Cuts | National News

Trump’s Higher Education Crackdown: Visa Revocations, DEI Bans, Lawsuits and Funding Cuts | National News

President Donald Trump wasted no time targeting higher education reform in his second term, kicking off a fight that often seemed personal. Education in recent years has been the battleground for culture war disputes from immigration to transgender rights along with political posturing on issues like student loan forgiveness, admissions practices and free speech on campus. Republicans have long been skeptical of higher education and accuse academics of indoctrinating youth with progressive ideologies, and Trump claimed that college campuses have been “infested with radicalism like never before.” Trump’s efforts revolve around curbing what he calls a “woke” agenda, with many of his steps aimed at reversing diversity, equity and inclusion policies that he says unfairly benefit some students over others. As president, Trump has leveraged the power of the federal government to threaten funding and restrict foreign student status, demanding an unprecedented role in university admissions, curriculum and operations. In many cases, he has used accusations of antisemitism or the credo of law and order as wedges to force broader scrutiny of higher education administrators …