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How Teachers Make Writing Achievable Without Lowering Standards

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“I’m just not a good writer.”

It’s a phrase teachers hear too often, usually at the exact moment a writing task is assigned. For many students, the leap from understanding a concept to putting it on paper feels like an impossible hurdle. Writing is often treated as a final “reveal” of learning at the end of a unit — potentially a high-pressure task that can feel overwhelming for students who haven’t been given a clear roadmap.

Educators are increasingly recognizing that to help students succeed, they have to move beyond simply assigning writing and start explicitly teaching it.

To explore how to make this shift, EdSurge caught up with Dr. Barrie Olson, vice president of reading curriculum and instruction at Curriculum Associates. Drawing on her experience as a literacy designer and former college professor, Olson discusses why students struggle with the demands of writing and how a “backward design” approach can transform writing instruction in the classroom.

EdSurge: We’ve seen a major shift toward research-based, explicit reading instruction over the past decade. Is writing on a similar trajectory? What does strong instruction look like in practice?

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Olson: The research base around writing is clear: Students become stronger writers when instruction is explicit, structured and grounded in knowledge-building content. So when we think about strong writing instruction, it is not about assigning more essays; it’s really about directly teaching the craft of writing.

We have to clarify the final product to bring that necessary focus and coherence to instruction. Each lesson across a unit should move students incrementally closer to that final writing task.

What are the most common reasons students struggle with writing, and what do those challenges look like in real classrooms?

It’s important to remember that writing is one of the most cognitively demanding things that students do in a classroom. Writing asks students to generate ideas, organize those ideas, select evidence, construct sentences and monitor conventions — all at the same time. For many students, that cognitive load can feel overwhelming.

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I think a lot of writing struggles stem from gaps in foundational writing skills. So students may not have had enough structured practice to organize their thinking, or they may struggle to express ideas orally, which, if you think about it, is just going to make it that much harder for them to then get it down on paper.

For teachers looking to strengthen writing instruction, what first step makes the biggest difference?

The most powerful starting point is backward design. It starts not with “What is the teacher doing with the student?” but with the teacher asking, “What do I want students to be able to produce at the end of this unit? Is it a literary analysis? Is it an evidence-based argument? Is it an explanatory essay? And then what kind of thinking do I want to see from my students?” Once that endpoint is clear, teachers can plan a coherent sequence of lessons that build the necessary skills step by step.

Writing prompts play a central role in instruction. What makes a writing prompt truly effective for students?

What I always tell people is that the quality of student writing is determined by the quality of the prompt. Are we giving them the information they need to be successful at this task? We see people who want to use shorter prompts or less complex ones. They think it’s easier when, in fact, vague prompts increase the cognitive load for students because they are left guessing.

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Clear prompts make instruction and assessment stronger because they can be aligned with explicit teaching. A well-designed prompt might feel hard, but it sets these students up for success because it is transparent about expectations. Any writing prompt should require students to return to the text, to quote, analyze and explain, which reinforces close reading skills while strengthening writing.

Even with strong prompts, writing can feel overwhelming. How can teachers scaffold tasks without oversimplifying?

When we talk about scaffolding writing, the key is chunking complexity. It is also starting much earlier than most people realize. Work doesn’t begin the day that students are told, “Hey, start your essay.” It begins on the first day of the unit. The key is not lowering the bar. The scaffolds and progression make rigorous writing achievable for all students.

These scaffolds not only help students get where they need to be and give them a clear sense of purpose, but they also send a really important message: Learning involves collecting information, layering it onto what we already know and then communicating what we’ve learned.

Why is it important to teach reading and writing together, and how can teachers integrate them in daily instruction?

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Reading and writing are reciprocal processes. When students analyze a text’s structure, an author’s argument or use of evidence, they’re building a blueprint for their own writing. Teaching reading and writing together makes literacy instruction more efficient and impactful because writing becomes a tool for thinking. It’s a cycle: Stronger reading leads to stronger writing, and stronger writing helps students defend their thinking and deepen comprehension.

I want to walk into a classroom that’s loud because kids are so excited about what they’re learning that they can’t keep it in. Writing gives them a way to leave a permanent record of their thinking.

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Avalanche Energy lands share of $5.2M DOD award to develop long-lasting ‘nuclear batteries’

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An early prototype of Avalanche Energy’s radiovoltaic converter for the DARPA Rads to Watts program is exposed to high-energy ion-beam irradiation. (Avalanche Photo)

Seattle fusion startup Avalanche Energy was awarded a share of a $5.2 million contract announced Wednesday from the U.S. Department of Defense to develop compact nuclear batteries.

The award comes from the DARPA Rads to Watts program, which is focused on building long-lasting batteries for defense and space applications where chemical batteries, solar power and refueling are not possible.

Avalanche is focused on engineering micro-fabricated energy cells that turn alpha particles emitted by radioactive material into electricity. The process, the team said, is analogous to solar cells converting photons into electricity.

“The goals are to produce a device that has a long lifetime, and that can produce orders of magnitude more power than current technologies,” said Daniel Velázquez, Avalanche’s physicist and materials science lead. The target is a battery that could continuously power a laptop computer, for example, for many months but weighs roughly 10 pounds.

And the timeline is tight. By the end of the 30-month program, the objective is to validate the physics involved and develop a power-producing prototype.

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“It’s very ambitious,” Velázquez said.

Avalanche is leading the team tackling DARPA’s nuclear battery challenge, which includes the University of Utah, Caltech, Los Alamos National Laboratory and McQuaide Microsystems.

Others are also working on nuclear batteries, including Seattle’s Zeno Power. The startup plans to demonstrate its first full-scale radioisotope power system this year and commercially produce nuclear batteries by 2027.

While Avalanche is ultimately working to develop a compact device that creates energy from fusion — the reactions that power the sun — the DARPA project feeds directly into that longer-term goal, Velázquez said. There are direct parallels to capturing energy from a nuclear battery and from fusion reactions.

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That should help the company compete in the global race to commercialize fusion power, which could provide nearly limitless clean energy. To support domestic enterprises, the Department of Energy is slated to commit a record-setting $135 million over 18 months to accelerate fusion research, Axios reported today.

Demand for new power is spiking with the expansion of data centers and the shift from fossil fuels to electrification.

Since launching in 2018, Avalanche has pursued multiple lines of revenue. Last month, the company announced it’s part of a team receiving $1.25 million from AFWERX, the innovation arm of the Department of the Air Force, to develop advanced materials for extreme environments.

Other efforts include using its fusion machine to produce neutrons for commercial customers; a Pentagon contract to develop technology for space propulsion; and a state grant to launch FusionWERX, a commercial-scale testing facility for fusion technologies in Eastern Washington.

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In February, Avalanche announced $29 million in new funding from investors, bringing its total to more than $105 million across venture capital and government grants — a war chest the company is deploying across fusion, propulsion and now compact nuclear batteries.

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Fi Mini for Cats Review: Track Your Pets and Monitor Their Activity

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Within the app, you can add safe zones, more pets with Fi trackers, and other users who can also track and monitor the pet. There’s a Health tab where you can add and store things like vet records, receipts, and insurance information, and add vets to easily share your pet’s documents and get appointment reminders. You can also set up the Fi app on your Apple Watch to have even quicker access to monitor your pet’s location, activity, and safety (including Lost Mode) without needing a phone.

When you open the app, you’ll see a map with live tracking showing where your pet is currently, as well as a notification of the last time they were outside and where they were. With the latter, you can pull up stats like location timeline, showing where they were and when. If you dive into any day when the tracker left the home, it will recreate the route, following the path and calculating the distance the pet traveled.

There’s also health-monitoring data from activity and sleep tracking, which is most useful for an indoor-only pet like mine. Like other health-tracking collars, stats for sleep and activity aren’t 100 percent accurate, as the app uses GPS to track movement, categorizing “activity” when the animal is moving and “sleep” when the pet is still for a prolonged period. This means that if Basil was awake but stationary, the app may inaccurately categorize this as sleep.

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Fi Mini App source Molly Higgins

In the Rest tab, you can see sleep metrics, including a daily summary of deep sleep, naps, and interruptions during nightly sleep. You can compare this over time, and the app notes how much more or less Basil slept than the night before. It also compares stats historically, by week, month, and year, so you can track trends and better understand your pet’s normal sleep schedule.

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The Activity tab is similar, tracking activity by day, week, and month, noting in the day’s timeline when the pet was most active and for how long. This also compares activity to the day before. I liked looking at the weekly report, comparing days during the week to see which he was most active during and if any patterns in activity popped up.

For example, I noticed that his sleep-versus-activity schedule was similar to mine, except he was active between 4:45 and 6:30 am (while I was still asleep), because that’s when his automatic feeder goes off for breakfast and my roommate is getting ready to leave for work. He was most active in the evenings, when I feed him dinner, have dedicated playtime, and my roommates are home, so there’s more activity to keep him awake. Historical comparison is also a super helpful way to track whether your pet is sleeping more or becoming more lethargic—an early warning sign of a bigger health problem.

Not Without Its Quirks

Since my cat is indoor-only, I ran some experiments to track location, using GPS on both the Fi Mini tracker and my phone. I also had a friend take the tracker out without my phone nearby to see whether I’d get pinged that “Basil” had left the safe zone.

Although it is better than not being alerted at all, the Fi’s GPS has limitations (as did the Tractive tracker I tested). It needs a strong signal to communicate with cell towers for accurate location. If your phone is close to the smart collar (via Bluetooth), it uses that instead of the Fi’s GPS, making it more accurate and alerting quicker. If the pet gets loose and is out of range of your phone, it uses the collar’s cellular antenna (in this case, Verizon cell towers). But because the Fi’s antenna isn’t as strong as a phone’s, location accuracy is lower, and the connection can be very spotty, especially if your pet is in the country or on acreage where cell towers are farther away.

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Eurail says December data breach impacts 300,000 individuals

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Eurail

Eurail B.V., a European travel operator that provides digital passes covering 33 national railways, says attackers stole the personal information of over 300,000 individuals in a December 2025 data breach.

Eurail is a Netherlands-based company that sells Interrail and Eurail passes for multi-country train travel across Europe, passes that are also available to young Europeans through the EU’s DiscoverEU program.

When it disclosed the incident in February, the company said the attackers gained access to travelers’ sensitive information, including full names, passport details, ID numbers, bank account IBANs, health information, and contact details (email addresses, phone numbers), after breaching its customer database.

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Eurail also warned at the time that the threat actors had published a sample of the stolen data on Telegram and were attempting to sell it on the dark web.

“The evidence showed that an unauthorized actor transferred files from our network on December 26, 2025,” the European train travel company said in breach notification letters sent to affected individuals on March 27.

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“We reviewed the files involved and, on February 25, 2026, determined that they contained some of your information. The information included your name and passport number.”

The same day, Eurail revealed in a filing with the Office of Oregon’s Attorney General that the resulting data breach impacted 308,777 individuals.

Eurail data breach filing with Oregon's OAG
Eurail data breach filing with Oregon’s OAG (BleepingComputer)

​While Eurail said that it didn’t store financial information or passport photocopies on the compromised systems, the European Commission warned in a separate alert that this type of data (as well as health information) may have been exposed for young travelers who received a Pass through the DiscoverEU program.

Eurail told customers whose information was exposed in the breach to remain vigilant against potential phishing attacks and scams, and advised them to update their Rail Planner app account passwords and reset them on any other platform where they’re also used.

The company added that customers should monitor their bank account activity and report any suspicious transactions to their bank as soon as possible.

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Last month, the European Commission also confirmed a data breach after the Europa.eu web platform was hacked in a cyberattack claimed by the ShinyHunters extortion gang.

Automated pentesting proves the path exists. BAS proves whether your controls stop it. Most teams run one without the other.

This whitepaper maps six validation surfaces, shows where coverage ends, and provides practitioners with three diagnostic questions for any tool evaluation.

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After Wi-Fi 7's Speed Push, Wi-Fi 8 Is Turning to Reliability

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Wi-Fi 8 is already taking shape, and while it won’t raise peak speeds beyond Wi-Fi 7, it promises something just as important: more reliable, lower-latency wireless performance where it actually matters.

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AMD finally puts a price tag on the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 and it’s hefty

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AMD has locked in the price for its Ryzen 9 9950X3D2, and it lands high at $899. This is a flagship desktop chip aimed at people who rely on fast systems every day and don’t want to rebuild everything just to get there.

The processor introduces a dual 3D V-Cache setup, which AMD is using to push both gaming and heavy workloads forward at the same time. It also fits into the current AM5 ecosystem, so users with compatible boards and memory can upgrade without replacing the core of their system.

It goes on sale April 22, though there’s no detail yet on how widely it will be available at launch.

Who this $899 chip is for

At $899, this chip sits well outside the mainstream. AMD is going after creators, developers, and power users who notice slowdowns immediately and are willing to pay to avoid them.

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The world’s first dual 3D V-Cache™ technology desktop processor.

AMD Ryzen™ 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition processor

Available April 22 | $899

Workstation-class performance meets the AM5 platform, no new motherboard or memory required.

Built for developers and content creators… pic.twitter.com/rN4ysy45X6

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— David McAfee (@McAfeeDavid_AMD) April 8, 2026

The pricing also signals where this part sits in the stack. It’s a top-tier option in the Ryzen 9000 lineup, built to prioritize sustained performance in demanding scenarios rather than broad affordability.

There’s a clear tradeoff here, where you’re paying more upfront to reduce waiting time during real work.

How dual V-Cache changes things

The dual 3D V-Cache design builds on AMD’s earlier work with stacked cache, but pushes it further. Instead of leaning mostly toward gaming gains, this version is meant to handle a wider mix of tasks without compromise.

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That shift is important because earlier X3D chips often felt specialized. This one is positioned as more balanced, giving users who split time between games and production workloads a stronger reason to consider it.

Still, AMD hasn’t shared detailed performance figures in this material, so it’s not yet clear how much improvement shows up across different types of work.

Should you upgrade now

Compatibility is one of the more practical advantages here. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 works with existing AM5 motherboards and memory, which makes it a simpler upgrade for current users.

That helps take some pressure off the high asking price, especially if you’re already invested in the platform. Instead of planning a full rebuild, you can focus on swapping the processor and moving on.

With the April 22 release approaching, the decision comes down to whether you need the extra headroom now or can wait for more data.

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The AI heat trap: why data centers must rethink thermodynamics

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For decades, the data center industry has operated on a relatively predictable model of thermodynamics. Operators built a hall, filled it with servers, and circulated cold air through the floor or aisles.

The heat load remained predominantly stable, electrical loads increased gradually, and cooling systems could be sized with conservative, static margins.

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The Fellowship That Taught Me Good Teaching Doesn’t Require Perfection

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Becoming a Voices of Change fellow empowered me to believe I could be a teacher with all my flaws — that “perfection” is not necessary. In fact, it is antithetical to good teaching. I remember sitting in our first workshop where we learned how to write a pitch and discussed what successful pitching looks like.

My takeaway from that workshop was that this fellowship was going to push me in ways I’d always been afraid of, that I’d have to practice a kind of vulnerability that went deeper than what I modeled for my students. I’d have to face myself.

The fellowship taught me that what makes me unique is what makes me the best teacher I can be. My individual voice and reflections were what I had to offer, and not just the restatement of well-researched best practices. During my fellowship, I learned that the more vulnerable and specific I was in telling my story as a classroom teacher, the more my voice as a writer would shine through. This sense of authenticity translated into my teaching, as I felt empowered to be myself and to see my differences as gifts.

My essay describing the time when two birds flew into my classroom taught me that play is education, and to this day, I can breathe when things go awry because, through writing that essay, I reaffirmed to myself that it’s okay for curriculum to slow down, for community building to be at the center.

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My essay exploring the power of neurodivergence led me to connect with other neurodivergent teachers and reminded me that my experiences are what make me the best teacher I can be. I used to be sad that my brain was built differently, but both the process and the outcome of that essay taught me that being different is a gift to share with others. I was most afraid to write that essay, but now I am most proud of it. I was once again reminded of the power in speaking my truth, especially when I’m most afraid to.

Overall, my essays taught me to pay attention to every moment of teaching, that sometimes the most mundane days of instruction offer kernels of truth and exploration. Topics such as boredom, artificial intelligence and allyship have been explored ad nauseam, but my editor empowered me to see that despite this, I still have a voice worth sharing, even when I didn’t think so.

As a result, I developed a confidence in myself that I carry with me to this day. I became more embodied as a human being, more present, because I realized that what made me me was actually what would allow me to connect more meaningfully with my students and the world. In extending that expansiveness and empathy towards myself, I had more empathy to give my students on their off days and more encouragement to give them on their better days. Ultimately, realizing that the most important stories I had to tell were topics I was too afraid to address publicly made me see that the core of education will always be about courage. Courage to be all of myself, to try new activities outside of and inside the classroom. I had to be ready to share myself to have the biggest impact as a writer. Similarly, I would have to do the same to be the best teacher I could be.

Since completing this fellowship, my identity as a human being has expanded. I now see myself not just as a teacher, but as a writer, a thinker, and an observer who has something to say. I feel more comfortable being me, and even empowered to do so. With each essay, I chipped away at my fears and accepted that the joy was in the process itself. Now, I tell my students something I have had to tell myself repeatedly during this fellowship: trust your voice.

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New framework lets AI agents rewrite their own skills without retraining the underlying model

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One major challenge in deploying autonomous agents is building systems that can adapt to changes in their environments without the need to retrain the underlying large language models (LLMs).

Memento-Skills, a new framework developed by researchers at multiple universities, addresses this bottleneck by giving agents the ability to develop their skills by themselves. “It adds its continual learning capability to the existing offering in the current market, such as OpenClaw and Claude Code,” Jun Wang, co-author of the paper, told VentureBeat.

Memento-Skills acts as an evolving external memory, allowing the system to progressively improve its capabilities without modifying the underlying model. The framework provides a set of skills that can be updated and expanded as the agent receives feedback from its environment.

For enterprise teams running agents in production, that matters. The alternative — fine-tuning model weights or manually building skills — carries significant operational overhead and data requirements. Memento-Skills sidesteps both.

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The challenges of building self-evolving agents

Self-evolving agents are crucial because they overcome the limitations of frozen language models. Once a model is deployed, its parameters remain fixed, restricting it to the knowledge encoded during training and whatever fits in its immediate context window.

Giving the model an external memory scaffolding enables it to improve without the costly and slow process of retraining. However, current approaches to agent adaptation largely rely on manually-designed skills to handle new tasks. While some automatic skill-learning methods exist, they mostly produce text-only guides that amount to prompt optimization. Other approaches simply log single-task trajectories that don’t transfer across different tasks.

Furthermore, when these agents try to retrieve relevant knowledge for a new task, they typically rely on semantic similarity routers, such as standard dense embeddings; high semantic overlap does not guarantee behavioral utility. An agent relying on standard RAG might retrieve a “password reset” script to solve a “refund processing” query simply because the documents share enterprise terminology.

“Most retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems rely on similarity-based retrieval. However, when skills are represented as executable artifacts such as markdown documents or code snippets, similarity alone may not select the most effective skill,” Wang said. 

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How Memento-Skills stores and updates skills

To solve the limitations of current agentic systems, the researchers built Memento-Skills. The paper describes the system as “a generalist, continually-learnable LLM agent system that functions as an agent-designing agent.” Instead of keeping a passive log of past conversations, Memento-Skills creates a set of skills that act as a persistent, evolving external memory.

Read-Write Reflective Learning

Read-Write Reflective Learning (source: arXiv)

These skills are stored as structured markdown files and serve as the agent’s evolving knowledge base. Each reusable skill artifact is composed of three core elements. It contains declarative specifications that outline what the skill is and how it should be used. It includes specialized instructions and prompts that guide the language model’s reasoning. And it houses the executable code and helper scripts that the agent runs to actually solve the task.

Memento-Skills achieves continual learning through its “Read-Write Reflective Learning” mechanism, which frames memory updates as active policy iteration rather than passive data logging. When faced with a new task, the agent queries a specialized skill router to retrieve the most behaviorally relevant skill — not just the most semantically similar one — and executes it.

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After the agent executes the skill and receives feedback, the system reflects on the outcome to close the learning loop. Rather than just appending a log of what happened, the system actively mutates its memory. If the execution fails, an orchestrator evaluates the trace and rewrites the skill artifacts. This means it directly updates the code or prompts to patch the specific failure mode. In case of need, it creates an entirely new skill.

Memento-Skills also updates the skill router through a one-step offline reinforcement learning process that learns from execution feedback rather than just text overlap. “The true value of a skill lies in how it contributes to the overall agentic workflow and downstream execution,”  Wang said. “Therefore, reinforcement learning provides a more suitable framework, as it enables the agent to evaluate and select skills based on long-term utility.”

Memento-Skills framework

Memento-Skills framework (source: arXiv)

To prevent regression in a production environment, the automated skill mutations are guarded by an automatic unit-test gate. The system generates a synthetic test case, executes it through the updated skill, and checks the results before saving the changes to the global library.

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By continuously rewriting and refining its own executable tools, Memento-Skills enables a frozen language model to build robust muscle memory and progressively expand its capabilities end-to-end.

Putting the self-evolving agent to the test

The researchers evaluated Memento-Skills on two rigorous benchmarks. The first is General AI Assistants (GAIA), which requires complex multi-step reasoning, multi-modality handling, web browsing, and tool use. The second is Humanity’s Last Exam, or HLE, an expert-level benchmark spanning eight diverse academic subjects like mathematics and biology. The entire system was powered by Gemini-3.1-Flash acting as the underlying frozen language model.

The system was compared against a Read-Write baseline that retrieves skills and collects feedback but doesn’t have self-evolving features. The researchers also tested their custom skill router against standard semantic retrieval baselines, including BM25 and Qwen3 embeddings.

Memento-skills performance

Performance on the GAIA benchmark (Memento-Skills vs Read-Write) (source: arXiv)

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The results proved that actively self-evolving memory vastly outperforms a static skill library. On the highly diverse GAIA benchmark, Memento-Skills improved test set accuracy by 13.7 percentage points over the static baseline, achieving 66.0% compared to 52.3%. On the HLE benchmark, where the domain structure allowed for massive cross-task skill reuse, the system more than doubled the baseline’s performance, jumping from 17.9% to 38.7%.

Moreover, the specialized skill router of Memento-Skills avoids the classic retrieval trap where an irrelevant skill is selected simply because of semantic similarity. Experiments show that Memento-Skills boosts end-to-end task success rates to 80%, compared to just 50% for standard BM25 retrieval.

The researchers observed that Memento-Skills manages this performance through highly organic, structured skill growth. Both benchmark experiments started with just five atomic seed skills, such as basic web search and terminal operations. On the GAIA benchmark, the agent autonomously expanded this seed group into a compact library of 41 skills to handle the diverse tasks. On the expert-level HLE benchmark, the system dynamically scaled its library to 235 distinct skills. 

Memento-skills skill development

Memento-Skills starts with a seed of skills (stars) and develops more skills (circles) as it solves tasks (source: arXiv)

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Finding the enterprise sweet spot

The researchers have released the code for Memento-Skills on GitHub, and it is readily available for use.

For enterprise architects, the effectiveness of this system depends on domain alignment. Instead of simply looking at benchmark scores, the core business tradeoff lies in whether your agents are handling isolated tasks or structured workflows.

“Skill transfer depends on the degree of similarity between tasks,” Wang said. “First, when tasks are isolated or weakly related, the agent cannot rely on prior experience and must learn through interaction.” In such scattershot environments, cross-task transfer is limited. “Second, when tasks share substantial structure, previously acquired skills can be directly reused. Here, learning becomes more efficient because knowledge transfers across tasks, allowing the agent to perform well on new problems with little or no additional interaction.”

Given that the system requires recurring task patterns to consolidate knowledge, enterprise leaders need to know exactly where to deploy this today and where to hold off.

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“Workflows are likely the most appropriate setting for this approach, as they provide a structured environment in which skills can be composed, evaluated, and improved,” Wang said.

However, he cautioned against over-deployment in areas not yet suited for the framework. “Physical agents remain largely unexplored in this context and require further investigation. In addition, tasks with longer horizons may demand more advanced approaches, such as multi-agent LLM systems, to enable coordination, planning, and sustained execution over extended sequences of decisions.”

As the industry moves toward agents that autonomously rewrite their own production code, governance and security remain paramount. While Memento-Skills employs foundational safety rails like automatic unit-test gates, a broader framework will likely be needed for enterprise adoption.

“To enable reliable self-improvement, we need a well-designed evaluation or judge system that can assess performance and provide consistent guidance,” Wang said. “Rather than allowing unconstrained self-modification, the process should be structured as a guided form of self-development, where feedback steers the agent toward better designs.”

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Some Advocates Concerned As States Push for Cameras in Special Education Classrooms

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As federal and state legislation swirls over the usage of cellphones and personal devices in classrooms, there is a renewed push for another form of technology: surveillance cameras.

Legislators in Florida, Iowa, Maryland, South Carolina and Tennessee introduced video surveillance bills this year, proposing placing cameras into self-contained special education classrooms, which are rooms solely for students with special needs.

The move comes as a handful of states – Louisiana, West Virginia, Georgia and Alabama – adopted the legislation over the last decade in an attempt to curb harmful physical practices. That includes teachers using restraints on students with behavioral issues and, in some cases, placing them in seclusion rooms or resorting to physical violence.

“There’s usually an impetus for why these pieces of legislation are being introduced, and it’s often because something happened where an educator probably felt overwhelmed, or didn’t quite know what to do in a situation,” says Lindsay Kubatzky, director of policy and advocacy at the National Center for Learning Disabilities.

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The latest surge of legislation comes amid a wave of technology crowding in — and getting pushed out — of the classroom. Districts are busy banning cellphones in classrooms as parents and experts debate the ethical use of education technology. Installing cameras, however, is something many parents of children in special education support.

“This protects everyone; this is your eyewitness in the room, that no one can say [someone] got it wrong,” says Jacqui Luscombe, who leads the Exceptional Student Education advisory board in Broward County School District.

But the move is controversial, even among disability advocates. Some believe it poses a privacy risk for both students and teachers, and further alienates an already “othered” population.

“What the big struggle seems to come down to is the tension of invading privacy versus the benefit of stronger accountability,” Denise Marshall, CEO of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, says.

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The Controversy

The push for cameras in special education classrooms is not new. Texas was the first to pass legislation in 2015, and four other states (Louisiana, West Virginia, Georgia and Alabama) eventually followed.

But as technology use of all kinds has grown in classrooms, there’s been a surge recently to include classroom cameras. “I do think we’re in the technology age where it’s not as cost-prohibitive as it used to be, and there’s all these apps that lend [themselves] to greater use,” Marshall says.

The Broward County School District in Florida had a three-year pilot program beginning in 2021. Under the pilot program, a parent could request a camera be placed in any classroom serving students solely with special needs. As the program neared its end in 2024, Luscombe urged the school board to make it permanent.

“The feedback I received was never anything other than, ‘Let’s have cameras,’” she says. “I’m sure there were plenty of parents saying, ‘We don’t need that,’ but for those who wanted it, it was empowering.”

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The board approved a permanent version of the program, and the district has installed cameras in 80 of its more than 1,000 Exceptional Student Education classrooms.

Florida legislators attempted to make it a statewide move, but the measure failed to make it out of the Senate committee.

Tennessee, Maryland, South Carolina and Iowa are in the process of reviewing legislation. Tennessee is the only state of the bunch that would require a majority of parents to sign off on the cameras. The latter three propose placing cameras in all special education classrooms.

Louisiana recently expanded its existing law. Initially, it allowed cameras to be installed at a parent’s request. Now the law requires cameras in all self-contained special education classrooms – rooms dedicated to special education students.

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West Virginia also requires all self-contained special education classrooms to have cameras, while Texas requires it only by parental request. Georgia allows schools to use their own discretion for placing cameras in self-contained special education classrooms, while Alabama requires cameras in classrooms where over half the students have special education needs.

Some of the legislation proposed, and Louisiana’s recently expanded law, explicitly ban restraints and seclusion rooms. Broward County’s does not, although the district requires teachers to learn de-escalation training. Luscombe acknowledges the district could do more training, particularly in under resourced schools.

“I personally have had conversations with the superintendent about more professional training, of, let’s not shove someone in a classroom, say ‘In you go,’ and then it becomes an exercise for survival,” Luscombe says.

Each state also has its own methods for reviewing footage, with some including footage leading up to and after a disputed incident. Others allow only administrators – not parents – to review footage.

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It plays into the concern of student privacy. All states with current laws, except South Carolina, reference the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, better known as FERPA, in their legislation. That was passed in 1974 and serves as the standard for student privacy.

Most advocacy groups – including the Council of Parents Attorneys and Advocates and the National Center for Learning Disabilities – have not taken an official stance on the issue. “[In 2015] was the first time we’ve started to really debate even how we felt about it,” COPAA’s Marshall says, adding that opinions in the group are mixed. “I think it’s too early to tell with the research what the effects are, and I don’t think the states are collecting the data to help understand.”

TASH, a Nashville-based disability advocacy group, condemned the decision when it was first up for debate after Texas passed its law. The group declared in a statement at the time that the video surveillance has become “an easy substitute for and distraction from the ongoing hard work of cultivating schoolwide inclusion, communication, trust and community. What is needed instead is a systemic framework from which to approach a culture shift around issues of safety.”

Necessity or Distraction?

There is no hard data, for Broward County or others, about whether the cameras have a direct impact on the number or intensity of incidents in classrooms.

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There are also concerns mandatory cameras in classrooms could discourage people from entering the profession of special education – worsening an already depleted workforce. According to federal data from the 2024-25 school year, special education had the most reported teacher shortages, affecting 45 states.

But Jacquelie Rodriguez, CEO of the National Center for Learning Disabilities, says she believes that argument is a distraction.

“The fact that we have what is considered a leaky bucket pipeline, where we have more people coming into the field and yet, we still don’t have enough to fill the vacancies, that’s not a product of video cameras,” she says. “I think that when people say that, they’re addressing a symptom, not the root cause of the concern.”

Rodriguez says instead of focusing on recording incidents, districts should concentrate on training teachers better to handle high-stress situations.

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“I don’t even think [cameras are] a Band-Aid; I think [they’re] a red herring,” Rodriguez says. “I think it’s the ability for someone to check a box and say they did something about it, when either they do know that they’re not doing anything about it, or they don’t realize that this is not going to solve the problem that they’re actually trying to address.”

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Hackers exploiting Acrobat Reader zero-day flaw since December

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Adobe

Attackers have been exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Adobe Reader using maliciously crafted PDF documents since at least December.

The attacks have been discovered by security researcher Haifei Li (the founder of the sandbox-based exploit-detection platform EXPMON), who warned on Tuesday that the attackers are using what he described as a “highly sophisticated, fingerprinting-style PDF exploit” to target an undisclosed Adobe Reader security flaw.

Li also said that these attacks have been targeting Adobe users for at least 4 months, stealing data from compromised systems using privileged util.readFileIntoStream and RSS.addFeed Acrobat APIs, and deploying additional exploits.

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“This ‘fingerprinting’ exploit has been confirmed to leverage a zero-day/unpatched vulnerability that works on the latest version of Adobe Reader without requiring any user interaction beyond opening a PDF file,” Li warned.

“Even more concerning, this exploit allows the threat actor to not only collect/steal local information but also potentially launch subsequent RCE/SBX attacks, which could lead to full control of the victim’s system.”

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Haifei Li has disclosed a long list of security vulnerabilities in Microsoft, Google, and Adobe software, many of which have been exploited in zero-day attacks.

Russian-language phishing lures

Threat intelligence analyst Gi7w0rm, who also analyzed this Adobe Reader exploit, found that PDF documents pushed in these attacks contain Russian-language lures referencing ongoing events in the Russian oil and gas industry.

Li has notified Adobe about these findings and, until the company releases security updates to address this actively exploited vulnerability, advised Adobe Reader users not to open PDF documents received from untrusted contacts until a patch is released.

Network defenders can also mitigate attacks exploiting this zero-day by monitoring and blocking HTTP/HTTPS traffic containing the “Adobe Synchronizer” string in the User-Agent header.

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“This zero-day/unpatched capability for broad information harvesting and the potential for subsequent RCE/SBX exploitation is enough for the security community to remain on high alert. This is why we have chosen to publish these findings immediately so users can stay vigilant,” he added.

BleepingComputer also reached out to Adobe with questions about Li’s findings, but a response was not immediately available.

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