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When Innocent James was in college, he bought a mobile library cart and began lending books to school-age children in Tanzania, where he lives. He was bothered when he realized that kids were returning the books without having read them because their homes were too dark at night. So James came up with a solution: a solar-powered backpack that can provide the light students need to read and study.

James knew why kids needed more light because he had faced the same problem as a kid. Less than half of Tanzania’s population has access to electricity. Families light their homes with oil-burning kerosene lamps. But the oil is expensive, and many people cannot afford to have their homes lit all evening.

Apparently fish can get lonely for the company of…people. An ocean sunfish at an aquarium in Japan was so affected by the absence of human visitors that it stopped eating. Then caretakers came up with a novel solution.

The sunfish has its own enclosure at the Kaikyokan aquarium (the Shimonoseki Marine Science Museum in Shimonoseki, Japan). This makes sense since ocean sunfish live alone in the wild. Still, while its species (also known as mola) is known for being solitary, the Kaikyokan sunfish seemed curious about other living things and often swam to the front of its tank to investigate human visitors.

But when the aquarium closed for renovations, there were no visitors. The sunfish stopped eating.

Caretakers struggled to figure out what was wrong. Thinking the fish had digestive issues, caretakers reduced its food portions. There was also the possibility that the construction sounds were a source of stress, so caretakers stopped by to offer comfort to the sunfish. Nothing worked.

Then one staff member came up with an unusual idea—one that might trick the sunfish into thinking the visitors had returned.

“We were skeptical but decided to do anything we could,” aquarist Moe Miyazawa told the Associated Press. 

Caretakers dressed human-shaped cutouts in their uniforms and placed the cutouts where visitors normally stand. The next morning, the sunfish ate for the first time in a week.

“I knew [the sunfish] was looking at us when we were placing [the cutouts], but I never thought it would start eating the next day,” Miyazawa said.

Staff member Mai Kato says she hopes the sunfish will get plenty of attention when the aquarium reopens.

“When the renovation work is finished, I’d like visitors to wave to it in front of the tank,” Kato told the Mainichi, a newspaper in Japan.

History books tell the story of Brown v. Board of Education, the court case that made school segregation illegal. But the fight to end school segregation is a lot older than that. For Black History Month, we’re telling a story that isn’t always included in the history books.

In 1850, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled on a school segregation case called Sarah C. Roberts v. The City of Boston. This decision would affect the lives of Americans for decades to come.

Massachusetts Schools

Let’s set the scene. In the 1840s, slavery was still legal in the southern United States. Like other northern states, Massachusetts no longer permitted slavery. But the state’s public schools were racially segregated. And the schools set aside for Black students were often not as well funded as the “white” schools.

In Boston, Massachusetts, many Black parents noted that the schools for Black children were in disrepair. They filed several petitions (formal complaints) with the Boston Primary School Committee. In 1846, they wrote to the committee that “the establishment of exclusive schools for our children…deprives us of those equal privileges and advantages in the public schools to which we are entitled as citizens. These separate schools cost more and do less for the children than other schools.”

Benjamin Roberts Goes to Court

In 1848, Boston resident Benjamin Roberts tried to send his 5-year-old daughter, Sarah, to the school closest to his home. But since this school was exclusively for white students, Roberts’s request was denied. He decided to sue the city of Boston.

Roberts hired Robert Morris, the first Black attorney in Massachusetts, who teamed up with abolitionist (anti-slavery activist) Charles Sumner. The pair argued the case before the Massachusetts Supreme Court on November 1, 1849. During the hearing, Sumner pointed out that the Massachusetts state constitution says that “all men, without distinction of color or race, are equal before the law.” In other words, school segregation was unconstitutional, meaning that it went against what the constitution says.

The court ruled against Roberts anyway.

After the Case

Roberts lost Sarah C. Roberts v. The City of Boston, but the story isn’t over. Black and white activists in Boston continued the battle together for years. Working with Sumner, Roberts took his anti-segregation argument to the Massachusetts legislature. In 1855, lawmakers banned segregation statewide.

But Sarah C. Roberts v. The City of Boston had another long-lasting effect—and not a good one. In the future, other courts would use the Sarah C. Roberts v. The City of Boston decision as proof that segregation was constitutional.

In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a case called Plessy v. Ferguson. The court ruled that it was legal and acceptable for schools, restrooms, and other facilities to be “separate but equal.” In other words, segregation was okay as long as facilities for Black and white Americans were the same. In reality, facilities for Black Americans were often much worse.

If great poetry comes from the heart, it makes sense to assume that artificial intelligence (AI) can’t write a decent poem. But in a recent study, many participants preferred AI-generated poetry to verses written by even the world’s greatest human poets.

The study used the AI chatbot known as ChatGPT. Created by a company called OpenAI, ChatGPT analyzes content and then learns to create its own content. For example, it can learn to write poetry by analyzing poems written by humans and then mimicking the poets’ writing styles.

In the study, researchers asked ChatGPT to generate poems in the style of some of the world’s best English-language writers. These included Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, T.S. Eliot, and Allen Ginsberg. Then the researchers asked 1,634 study participants to read 10 poems. Five of the poems were written by a human poet, and the other five were written by ChatGPT in the same style as that human poet.

The researchers asked the participants which poems were written by humans, and only 46 percent of the responses were correct.

Next, the researchers gathered 696 new participants and asked them to read 14 poems and rate each one. Some of these poems had been written by humans, and others had been created by AI. But the participants weren’t told this. Instead, one-third of the participants were told that a chatbot had generated all the poems. Another third were told a human had written them. The remaining third were not told anything about who created the poems.

The participants who thought the poems were written by humans rated them more highly than the group who thought the chatbot was the author. Researchers expected this to be the case.

What researchers did not expect had to do with the group that didn’t know who or what had written the poems. These participants gave higher ratings to the poems that had been written by the chatbot!

Even though ChatGPT is good at copying writers’ styles, it turns out that AI-generated poetry just isn’t the same as poems written by talented humans. Researchers say that among the poems they used in their study, the AI poetry was simpler and more straightforward than the human poetry. That may be why some study participants seemed to like it better.

Running one marathon is challenging enough for most people—but Hilde Dosogne isn’t most people. The Belgian runner ran a marathon every single day of 2024.

Beginning on January 1, 2024, Dosogne, 55, ran a marathon length (26.2 miles or 42.2 kilometers) every day for 366 days (2024 was a leap year). She took on the challenge to raise money for breast cancer. By the end of the year, she had collected about 65,000 euros (more than 67,000 dollars) in donations for the charity BIG Against Breast Cancer.

Dosogne is an experienced runner. In 2022 and 2023, she ran the 153-mile (246-kilometer) race called the Spartathlon in Greece. Even so, daily marathons posed a special challenge. On top of going to work and caring for her kids, Dosogne had to be ready to run a long distance every day, no matter what the weather brought or how she was feeling.

And she wasn’t always feeling great. During the year, Dosogne suffered from COVID-19, the flu, and blisters. One day, she fell and dislocated her finger after running 17 miles (27 kilometers). After a trip to the emergency room, she returned home and started the day’s run all over again. Despite all this, Dosogne said the hardest part was convincing herself to keep going.

“The mental strain is harder than the physical. Of course, physically, everything has to be okay. Otherwise, you can’t run for four hours every day,” Dosogne told the Associated Press. “But it was more [mentally difficult] to be there at the start-line every day.”

Dosogne tried to make each marathon as “easy” as possible by running on a flat (not hilly) loop near her home and inviting friends to run with her. The friends also served as witnesses who could prove that Dosogne was covering the full distance every day.

Dosogne has plenty of evidence that she ran all those marathons, and she plans to send it along with an application to Guinness World Records. Dosogne’s feat was a first—no woman had ever before run a marathon every day in a single year. 

For Matebogo Victoria, attending a university in South Africa wasn’t easy. Victoria is deaf, and the university didn’t provide her with any of the support she needed to understand or communicate with her teachers. Instead, she went to her classes with a hearing person, who would then translate between speech and sign language.

Victoria knew she wasn’t alone. In South Africa, deaf people sometimes don’t complete school because communication is too difficult. That’s why she started Voiceout Deaf, a program that teaches farming skills to deaf people, giving them a way to earn a living.

“The government does not have facilities for communication [for deaf people]. A lot of deaf people did not finish school,” Victoria told the Associated Press. While South Africa has 44 schools for deaf people, not everyone lives near one of these schools. “They cannot afford to travel far to reach schools [for deaf people], so normally they decide to leave school early.” 

As part of Voiceout Deaf, farmers-in-training work at three different farms. They till, plow, plant seeds, and harvest produce. Most of the workers use sign language, making communication easy. Although the farm is a learning environment, it’s also a workplace and a business. The farmers get paid for their labor, and their produce is sold to customers, including some supermarkets. 

Just as school can be a challenge for deaf people in South Africa, so can many jobs. The nation’s government has a language board—a group of people who are responsible for promoting the use of South Africa’s languages. The board recently got South African lawmakers to make sign language the nation’s 12th official language. But sign language isn’t used everywhere. And sometimes, companies use technical words that are rarely used anywhere else. It takes a while to develop signs for those words. 

Voiceout Deaf is giving deaf people a chance to work in an environment where they will be understood and make the money necessary to live independent lives.

“I’m happy working here; it’s [a] pleasure working here in the farm,” Sibongile Maake told the Associated Press. “I’m working slowly but surely, and I am learning while also getting a salary. I can do things for myself.”

Jimmy Carter, who served as the 39th president of the United States, has died. He was 100. In addition to his work as president, Carter will be remembered for what he accomplished after he left the White House. 

James Earl Carter, Jr., was born in 1924 in the tiny town of Plains, Georgia. He grew up on his family’s farm. After attending college in Georgia, he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946, the same year he married Rosalynn Smith. Carter served as an officer in the U.S. Navy for seven years. But when his father died in 1953, he and Rosalynn returned to Georgia to take over the family farm. 

Carter began his political career in 1962, when he was elected to the Georgia state senate. He became governor of the state in 1971. As governor, he voiced his opposition to racial discrimination at a time when many white leaders were reluctant to do so. 

“I say to you quite frankly, the time for discrimination is over,” Carter said in his first speech as governor. 

Carter was elected president in 1976. He worked to get funding to research sustainable solar and wind energy—a fairly new idea at the time—and spoke out against governments that violated their citizens’ human rights. He also helped negotiate a historic peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. Carter was not elected to a second term as president, due in part to voters’ unhappiness about high gas prices.

After leaving the White House, Carter worked for causes that were important to him, including democracy and human rights. He worked with an organization called Habitat for Humanity, which builds homes for people who could not otherwise afford them. Both Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter not only raised funds for the organization but also worked frequently on its construction projects. 

“To have a decent place to live is a basic human right,” Carter said in a 2017 interview with Bloomberg.com. “And also to have a chance to live in peace and to have…health care and…education, so you can take advantage of your talents.” 

President Carter also used his position as a world leader to travel around the globe, helping to work out disagreements between nations and monitoring elections to be sure they were carried out fairly. 

Leaders from around the world paid tribute to President Carter after his death. 

“To all of the young people in this nation and for anyone in search of what it means to live a life of purpose and meaning—the good life—study Jimmy Carter, a man of principle, faith, and humility,” U.S. President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden said in a statement. “He showed that we are a great nation because we are a good people—decent and honorable, courageous and compassionate, humble and strong.”

Click through the slideshow below for highlights from President Carter’s remarkable life.

Scientists have spent a long time studying how the dinosaurs became extinct, but a lot less is known about how these massive reptiles were able to become the dominant predators of their time. Now, researchers have begun to unravel this mystery. And it’s all thanks to dinosaur poop.

Poop fossils, which scientists call coprolites, contain a wealth of information about the animals that produced them. Their size is related to the size of the animals, and their contents include remnants of what the animals ate. So a group of scientists led by Martin Qvarnström of Uppsala University in Sweden studied more than 500 coprolites dating back 247 million to 200 million years. 

Farmers and elephants often don’t get along. With its massive size and hearty appetite, one elephant can destroy an entire harvest in a single day, endangering the farmer’s ability to survive. In Africa, farmers have sometimes killed elephants to stop them from eating crops. But farmers now have a solution that protects both the elephants and the crops—the careful placement of beehives.

Studies show that elephants are frightened of swarming bees and will usually leave an area when they know the buzzing insects are around. So an organization called Save the Elephants is helping farmers in several African nations to create beehive fences around their crops by attaching the hives to wires that surround the crops. 

The hives are several feet off the ground, so they’re somewhat protected from honey badgers, which aren’t afraid of bees; but the hives will get shaken if an elephant tries to pass through the fence. Once an elephant shakes a hive, the bees swarm, and the elephant runs away. Just the smell of the bees and the hum of their buzzing is enough to scare away some elephants. 

A father and son were looking for an ancient Roman road in a Polish forest when they came across a literal buried treasure: a trove of extremely rare coins dating back hundreds of years.

Sławomir Milewski and his son Szymon were taking part in a group effort to find the road in a wooded area near Warsaw, Poland’s capital city, when they found the coins in a shallow hole. Though the group never located the road, this other discovery was just as exciting.

“At first there was a great noise, because everyone who participated in the search—and there were a dozen of us—came running at the call of the discoverers, and we all realized that we had discovered something incredible,” Mateusz Sygacz of the Polish “Husaria” Treasure Hunters Association told All That’s Interesting.