What happened
New York City yesterday announced that AI tools will be banned in public grade and middle schools and sharply limited for high school students. Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s office called the one-year moratorium the country’s “most expansive” limits on AI in schools. The “sweeping new policy” for the nation’s largest school district will also bar individual screens for students until third grade, The New York Times said. “So-called companion chatbots” will be “banned in all grades,” and “all high schoolers will be taught about AI literacy.”

Who said what
“The tech industry wants us to believe that AI in early education is not only inevitable, but that it is necessary,” Mamdani said yesterday. “We do not see it that way.” A “backlash” from parents “against the growing use of digital devices and AI in the classroom” has pushed many school districts to enact new restrictions, the Times said. The Los Angeles school district — the nation’s second-largest — just began “temporarily blocking access to generative AI tools on student devices across all grades,” The Associated Press said. Other schools are “working to teach children how to incorporate the technology while preventing them from relying too heavily on it or using it to cheat.”

What next?
New York’s new rules will be in place for this school year, which begins next week, and can be extended or amended.

What happened
The NBA yesterday punished the Los Angeles Clippers with the largest sanctions in league history after finding that owner Steve Ballmer and other team executives violated salary cap rules to funnel millions of dollars to star forward Kawhi Leonard. The Clippers were fined $30 million and stripped of five first-round draft picks, from 2029 to 2033. Leonard was fined $700,000, and Ballmer was banned from all team and league activities for a year. 

Who said what
A one-year independent investigation found that the Clippers had improperly “covered personal expenses for Leonard,” CNN said, and “funneled off-court endorsement opportunities” to him through corporate partners who were rewarded with lucrative “team business.” Paying Leonard via a team sponsor would strike “at the very heart of the NBA’s most important financial rules” to ensure a “roughly level playing field” across the league, The Wall Street Journal said. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said he was “deeply disappointed by the flagrant violations,” and “the severity of the penalties reflects” their “seriousness.”

What next?
The Clippers said they “vehemently reject” the NBA’s “heavily biased investigation” and “intend to vigorously challenge these findings and penalties through every avenue available to us.” There is “no appeal or arbitration process available to the team,” The Athletic said, citing a league source.

The newest search-and-rescue recruits are cockroaches. Scientists have outfitted the insects with capabilities to locate and administer medical care to people in remote or hard-to-reach locations. 

Paramedic cyborg cockroaches, called Paraborgs, can be a “field-deployable medical intervention,” said a study published in the journal Advanced Science. The robotic roaches carry “cameras and miniature medical injectors” that could “deliver supervised emergency care to people trapped in collapsed buildings, caves or other places too dangerous for rescuers to reach,” Australia’s University of Queensland said in a news release on the study. 

To create the cyborgs, scientists fitted North Queensland giant burrowing cockroaches (Macropanesthia rhinoceros), the “heaviest cockroach species in the world that ​measure up to 3.3 inches, with backpacks containing syringe cylinders and cameras,” said Reuters. “Once we implant an electrode into the insect,” said biorobotics ‌engineer and study co-author Thang Vo-Doan, “we can apply a small electrical signal to activate or stimulate the nerve system so that they can respond to our command.” 

“Ethical guidelines for invertebrate research are not yet standardized,” said the study. But the cockroaches were “provided with a suitable living environment” and “decent nutrition.” 

The Paraborgs had a 95% success rate at performing close-range injections in proof-of-concept experiments. “The long-term goal is targeted human-supervised intervention in places conventional medical technologies cannot access,” said Thanh Nho Do, a medical robotics associate professor at the University of New South Wales who worked on the study.