Test scores "are lower than they were a decade ago in school districts across the U.S.," reports Times magazine, citing new data released Wednesday by Stanford researchers. "Reading scores were down roughly 0.6 grades in 2025 compared to 2015, and math scores were down about 0.4 grades. This means that students were 60% of one school year behind where their peers were in reading a decade earlier and 40% of one school year behind in math." But Stanford's announcement notes that America's schools "were in a 'learning recession' for seven years before the COVID-19 pandemic, with student test scores in math and reading on a steady decline since 2013." This reversal ended two decades of progress, according to Sean Reardon, the Professor of Poverty and Inequality at Stanford Graduate School of Education, whose data forms the backbone of the new research... The study reframes the narrative of pandemic-era learning loss, arguing that the crisis of the last few years was an acceleration of a problem that was already underway. "The pandemic was the mudslide that followed seven years of erosion in student achievement," said Professor Tom Kane, faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, and a lead author of the report... The study found that the slowdown in learning coincided with two major shifts in American childhood and education policy: the widespread dismantling of test-based accountability systems that defined the No Child Left Behind era and the rise of social media use among young people. Reading scores, in particular, suffered consistently, with the average annual loss in the years just before the pandemic being just as large as the loss during it... Today, 8th-grade reading scores on national assessments are at their lowest point since 1990. Compounding the problem, chronic student absenteeism remains a major obstacle to improving learning. Though down from its pandemic peak, 23 percent of students were chronically absent in the 2024-25 school year, far above the pre-pandemic rate of 15 percent. More context from Time magazine: Reading scores were down roughly 0.6 grades in 2025 compared to 2015, and math scores were down about 0.4 grades. This means that students were 60% of one school year behind where their peers were in reading a decade earlier and 40% of one school year behind in math... "The decline started around the time that social media's use among teens was exploding, and this was also occurring in a number of other countries," says Thomas Kane, one of the authors of the Educational Scorecard report and a professor at Harvard University... [H]e maintains that it is at the core of the decline in reading achievement. He points out that social media use was shown to be heaviest among the lowest achieving students. "Some states and school districts are making progress," notes the Associated Press, "largely by shifting toward phonics-based instruction and providing extra support for struggling readers." And "The picture is also brighter in math. Almost every state in the analysis saw improvements in math test scores from 2022 to 2025."

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"We may have accidentally detected dark matter back in 2019," writes ScienceAlert. "What if instead of trying to see dark matter, scientists attempted to hear it instead?" asks Space.com: New research suggests dark matter could leave a tiny but discernible imprint in the cacophony of ripples in spacetime called "gravitational waves" that ring through the cosmos when two black holes slam together and merge... Fortunately, when it comes to detecting gravitational waves from colliding black holes, humanity's instruments, such as LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), are getting more and more sensitive all the time... Vicente and colleagues searched through data gathered by LIGO and its fellow gravitational wave detectors, KAGRA (Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector) and Virgo, focusing on 28 of the clearest signals from merging black holes. Of these, 27 appeared to have come from mergers that occurred in the relative vacuum of space. One signal, however, GW190728, first heard on July 19, 2019, and the result of merging binary black holes with a combined mass of 20 times that of the sun and located an estimated 8 billion light-years away, seemed to carry the telltale trace of this merger occurring in a region of dense, "buttery" dark matter. The team behind this research is quick to point out that this can't be considered a positive detection of dark matter, but does say it gives us a hint at what to look for and thus where to direct follow-up investigations... "We know that dark matter is around us. It just has to be dense enough for us to see its effects," said team leader Josu Aurrekoetxea, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Department of Physics. "Black holes provide a mechanism to enhance this density, which we can now search for by analyzing the gravitational waves emitted when they merge." They published their results this week in the journal Physical Review Letters.

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As the campaign draws to a close, we looked at what each of the teams did best this season in the English top-flight

“What enriches you is the game, not the result. The result is a piece of data,” the Spanish football coach Juanma Lillo once said. “The birthrate goes up. Is that enriching? No. But the process that led to that? Now that’s enriching.”

Let that serve as the thinking behind the first annual Football Style Awards, a celebration of process over results. These awards are not about who won, though they are about pieces of data. A club data scientist friend and I have spent the last year building a new football app called futi that measures not just who’s good but what they’re good at, based on detailed phase of play data and models that measure how teams and players play.

Saturday night’s fight came a decade too late to be relevant. But it also provided a spectacle MMA’s most powerful organization has been lacking

When Ronda Rousey stepped into the cage for the first time in almost a decade on Saturday night to challenge fellow mixed martial arts trailblazer Gina Carano, the fight was over before it ever really began. In a flash, Rousey had Carano locked in her signature armbar, leaving her opponent little choice but to tap. The fight lasted a mere 17 seconds.

“I didn’t really want to hurt her,” Rousey said after her win. “It was beautiful martial arts, that’s what I think that was. It was art.”

US president writes ‘vote the bum out’ as congressman faces close race against Trump-endorsed Republican

With two days to go before the next big test of Donald Trump’s iron grip over his party, the president went head-to-head on Sunday with his nemesis, Thomas Massie the Kentucky congressman who is in a fight for his political life in Tuesday’s Republican primary.

Over an eight-hour period starting in the early hours of Sunday, Trump took to his bully pulpit on Truth Social to taunt Massie, one of very few senior Republicans who has dared to defy him. Massie is the “worst and most unreliable Republican Congressman in the history of our Country”, the rant began, followed by a mid-morning exhortation to Kentucky voters to “vote the bum out on Tuesday”.

️ Updates from the final round at Aronimink Golf Club
️ Official live leaderboard | Follow us on Bluesky | Mail Scott

Let’s start with the weather report. It’s going to be the warmest day of the week, so expect the course to get firmer and faster as the day goes on. Given the contours and kinks of the fairways and greens, that’ll be a double-edged sword. The wind has been pretty benign so far today, but it’s expected to get up as we progress, so the earlier starters have had an advantage. All in all, similar to yesterday, when scoring became progressively harder. Goodness knows how this is likely to pan out as a result, but if someone breaks from the pack and posts a score mid-afternoon, things could get interesting for the final pairings.

At the risk of becoming a hostage to fortune, there’s a fair chance this is going to end in a play-off, isn’t there. So with 47 players starting the day within seven shots of the lead – and the record comeback from a 54-hole deficit by a winner at the PGA Championship is seven – let’s not concern ourselves too much with the possible outcomes, narratives and permutations. Instead, let’s just go with the flow. Here’s how the top of the leaderboard looked after 54 holes …

An anonymous reader shared this report from Electrek: When Fisker Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June 2024, it left roughly 11,000 Ocean SUV owners holding the keys to vehicles that cost them anywhere from $40,000 to $70,000 — and that were rapidly losing the software brains that made them work. No more over-the-air updates. No more connected services. No more warranty. The manufacturer was dead. What happened next is one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the electric vehicle industry. Instead of accepting that their cars would become rolling paperweights, Fisker Ocean owners organized, reverse-engineered their vehicles' proprietary software, hacked into CAN bus networks, built open-source tools on GitHub, and effectively stood up a volunteer-run open-sourced car company from the ashes of Fisker... Within months of the bankruptcy filing, thousands of Ocean owners formed the Fisker Owners Association (FOA) — a nonprofit that quickly grew to 4,000 members and began operating as something between a car club, a tech startup, and an independent automaker. The FOA hired independent tech experts who began reverse-engineering Fisker's proprietary software patches. Members taught each other how to flash firmware. They organized bulk purchases of replacement parts — negotiating the price of key fobs down from roughly $1,000 each to a fraction of that through coordinated group buys. They hosted free global key fob pairing events, saving each owner $100 to $250... What started as desperate troubleshooting has evolved into a genuine open-source ecosystem around the Fisker Ocean. On GitHub, a developer named MichaelOE reverse-engineered the API behind Fisker's official "My Fisker" mobile app and built a Home Assistant integration that exposes every cloud API value as a sensor — with all the app's buttons available as Home Assistant controls... [Community members have also been systematically mapping CAN bus files.] The article noes this "is not an isolated incident. Nikola also filed for bankruptcy, leaving its owners in a similar bind. Canoo and Arrival are headed for liquidation auctions..." Consumer advocates are now pushing for structural changes: mandatory software escrow funds that would keep vehicle software running even if the manufacturer disappears, open-source mandates in bankruptcy proceedings, and shared repair data requirements... European automakers, meanwhile, are moving in a different direction entirely — Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and eight suppliers signed a memorandum in 2025 to develop a shared open-source automotive software platform.... The Fisker Owners Association has proven that a dedicated community can keep orphaned EVs on the road. But they shouldn't have had to... [O]wners shouldn't need to become hackers and parts brokers and quasi-manufacturers just to keep driving the cars they already paid for.

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