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Nidhi Singhvi, who previously co-founded gold jewelry company Sonalore, has launched Unvault with co-founder Navya Reddy in 2025. The platform lets users track the value of jewelry they already own and sell it, and has so far unlocked more than $150 million in value for customers.
Meta has expanded its Instagram School Partnership Program, adding tools that let verified students and staff post Stories and notes visible only to their own school. The update also introduces admin-only channels for parent and student updates, school-wide clubs and teams, and a student directory limited to peers and mutual teen followers.
Instagram is rolling out new features for schools enrolled in Meta's School Partnership Program, letting verified students and administrators create clubs and teams that can post Stories and Notes visible only to verified peers. Schools can also set up Channels for broader updates to students, parents and teachers, alongside a verified school directory and profile banners. Meta uses third-party service UNiDAYS to verify student identities, and the features are live starting today.
A wave of legal actions against companies like OpenAI are increasingly framing chatbots as defective products rather than just faulting their outputs. British Columbia's government recently sued OpenAI, claiming the company failed to alert police ahead of a mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in February.
Dr. Martin, a teacher, recounts being physically assaulted by a high-school emotional support student, an attack that led to surgeries and a long recovery. She writes that when she shared her story, people responded with sympathy but little surprise, which she says reflects how commonplace violence against teachers has become.
A commentary piece challenges Nikole Hannah-Jones's viral essay about sending her daughter to a high-poverty, majority-black public school in New York City. It contends the school actually received unusually high per-pupil funding of $52,349 and a 1:10 faculty-student ratio, and cites unsupervised lunchroom fighting, fabricated homework, and inflated grades that Hannah-Jones allegedly overlooked.
Computer scientist Manuel Blum's essay outlines strategies for succeeding in graduate school, covering reading, studying, research and writing. He compares finite automata to Turing machines to illustrate how tools like paper and pencil can dramatically expand problem-solving power, and encourages students to read non-linearly and annotate texts as they learn difficult material.
Education writer Benjamin Riley's reporting alleges that Alpha School, a $75,000-a-year private school network marketed around AI tutoring, has students monitored via laptop webcams and heart-rate monitors, with wrong answers reviewed on Zoom calls by workers reportedly based in India rather than by AI systems. Former students describe feeling surveilled like lab subjects, and academic Matt Seybold has linked the practice to what he calls AI's 'Mechanical Turk problem,' where human labor from the Global South stands in for automated systems.
Andreessen Horowitz is funding a San Francisco academy, led by Udemy cofounder Gagan Biyani, that offers high school graduates a tuition-free, one-year program focused on building startups rather than academic coursework. The founding cohort of about 50 students will skip tests and homework, instead working on real projects with mentors from firms like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta, and receiving roughly $50,000 in computing credit plus a $5,000 travel and research budget. OpenAI's Sam Altman is named as a guest lecturer or instructor, and other tech figures, including Fidji Simo, are contributing funding.
Stanford School of Medicine researchers report that the human brain forms from two separate types of stem cells rather than one uniform source. One lineage, marked by the Otx2 gene, produces the midbrain and forebrain responsible for higher-order thinking and speech, while a distinct stem cell type gives rise to the hindbrain, which governs basic functions like heartbeat and breathing. Researcher Kyle Loh says this finding allows scientists to grow hindbrain neurons in a lab dish for the first time.
A practicing surgeon writes about recurring bouts of depression, anxiety and burnout during 13 years in medicine, prompted by the suicide of Brisbane gastroenterologist Dr Andrew Bryant. He describes extreme on-call schedules, including 12 days of 24-hour availability out of 14, and long study hours during exam preparation as major stressors affecting his family and personal life.
Duncan McIntyre founded Highland Electric Fleets in Massachusetts in 2018 after noticing his son's school bus tailpipe exposed children to diesel exhaust. The company, which finances and manages the transition to electric school bus fleets, now generates roughly $50 million annually, is pursuing contracts in about 200 cities, and has secured a sponsorship role with the 2028 Olympics.