In Dakar, Senegal, a surf academy is making waves by combining surfing lessons with education, helping approximately 20 girls return to school. The program, run by the US group Black Girls Surf, is located in the fishing village of Xataxely and requires girls to attend classes if they want to participate in surfing. This initiative, highlighted by Euronews, aims to provide educational opportunities for girls who had dropped out or never enrolled in school.
The four-month program blends surfing instruction with evening classes, catering primarily to girls from Lebou households, a traditional Wolof fishing community. The program's structure is straightforward: participation in surfing is contingent upon attending school. This approach, as detailed by Euronews, seeks to address educational disparities within the community.
In other news, an experimental surgical procedure is offering hope to cancer survivors who wish to have children. As reported by MIT Technology Review, the procedure involves temporarily moving the uterus, ovaries, and fallopian tubes out of the way during cancer treatment to protect them from the damaging effects of radiation and chemotherapy. Once treatment is complete, the organs are repositioned.
The procedure has shown promising results. Last week, a team in Switzerland announced the birth of a baby boy, Lucien, whose mother had undergone the surgery. This was the fifth baby born after the procedure and the first in Europe, according to Daniela Huber, the gyno-oncologist who performed the operation, as reported by MIT Technology Review.
Meanwhile, in the realm of technology, WordPress has launched a new Claude connector, allowing site owners to share back-end data with Anthropic's chatbot system, as reported by TechCrunch. Users can control the specific data they share and revoke access as needed. Claude is given read-only access, preventing it from altering the user's CMS.
However, last year WP claimed that it would eventually deliver write access to the MCP integration, presumably allowing users to conduct editorial tasks directly from a connected chatbot of their choosing. After Claude is linked to an account, users can ask the chatbot questions about the site data it has access to, such as summarizing monthly web traffic or analyzing post performance, according to TechCrunch.
Finally, a recent critique has cast doubt on claims that trees can sense solar eclipses. A team of scientists previously presented evidence that spruce trees in Italy synchronized their bioelectrical activity in anticipation of a partial solar eclipse. However, this research has drawn criticism from other researchers, who question the validity of the findings, as reported by Ars Technica. The critique, published in the journal Trends in Plant Science, raises concerns about the original paper's conclusions.
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