Bullying. Isolation. Stress.

Everyone experiences these on the journey from adolescence to adulthood, but new data on the mental health of LGBTQ+ youth shows the additional pressures they face increases their risk of suicide compared to their peers.

The Trevor Project, a nonprofit focused on suicide prevention for LGBTQ+ youth, has released its most recent survey of 16,000 LGBTQ+ young people 13 to 24. Among the most concerning figures was one in 10 participants reporting that they had attempted suicide during the previous year. And more than one-third seriously considered suicide.

Experts also tell EdSurge that the strain of mental health issues and unwelcoming school settings directly harm students’ ability to thrive in, or even attend, their classes.

Despite the sobering results of the survey, the data also reveals solutions — including a role for schools.

“One of the most important findings is that when adults, institutions, and communities become more affirming, the suicide risk of LGBTQ+ young people goes down,” Ronita Nath, the Trevor Project’s vice president of research, says. “Schools play a life-saving support by creating environments where LGBTQ+ young people feel safe, accepted and supported.”

Feeling the Pressure

With 2026 on track to be another record-breaking year for anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced at the state and federal levels, a vast majority of survey respondents said they felt stressed, anxious or unsafe due to the policies and the debates surrounding them.

When those young people are caught in the crossfire of heated political debates, Nath says the negative rhetoric that trickles down has real consequences. Youth who reported experiencing victimization due to their gender identity or sexual orientation — like bullying, physical harm or exposure to conversion therapy — were three times as likely to attempt suicide as their peers.

Those risks dropped among survey participants who said their school affirmed their identity. Support can look like adopting curriculum that counters anti-LGBTQ+ bias and increasing access to mental health services.

Forty-four percent of survey participants said they couldn’t access the mental health services they needed. Some of the barriers to those services were tangible, like not being able to afford transportation to see a counselor. But many were not: they cited fear of their mental health problems not being taken seriously, not being understood by a mental healthcare provider, or past negative experiences that made young people hesitant to seek services again.

Nath encouraged schools to offer gender and sexuality alliances (GSAs), ensure anti-harassment policies were in place and provide professional development for educators to help ease students’ discomfort. “We know [that] not only improves mental health and well-being for LGBTQ+ youth, but for all their peers,” she says.

Strain on School Success

Research shows that well-being, engagement and a sense of belonging go hand-in-hand with students’ ability to thrive in school, according to Megan Pacheco, executive director of Challenge Success. The group is a nonprofit focused on increasing student well-being, engagement and belonging that’s based in Stanford’s Graduate School of Education.

The stress that gender-diverse students — including transgender, non-binary and gender-queer youth — experience can become an obstacle to their academic success. If they feel their identity is threatened or lack a sense of belonging, Pacheco says, they’re less likely to reach out for help.

“It’s going to affect their participation, how they show up in the classroom, and it’s going to affect their well-being,” she says.

Challenge Success’ large trove of survey data on the school experiences of middle and high school students reveals that students who identify as transgender, non-binary or gender diverse report more stress than their peers who identify as boys and girls, says Sarah Miles, director of research for Challenge Success.

“Instead of two or three sources of stress — family pressure, or peer relationships, or social media — it is just all the above,” Miles says. “In order to be able to function, use your working memory, be present, be engaged … if you have all those things on board that you’re worrying about, you’re just not able to attend to school in the same way.”

Among LGBTQ+ youth who are in school, about 85 percent said they had at least one adult at school who is affirming of their identity, according to the Trevor Project data. More than half of respondents said school was an affirming place, second to online spaces.

Matthew Rice, who chairs the science department at a New Jersey high school, tells EdSurge that students don’t judge safety by a school’s mission statement — they judge it by how adults respond to situations like harassing comments made in the hallway, classroom jokes, pronoun use and whether discipline is applied consistently among varying groups of students.

Rice has published research on the experiences of transgender and nonbinary educators, but the overall lessons gleaned from his work apply to students as well.

“Students notice who is allowed to exist authentically in schools,” Rice said via email. “Representation is not symbolic: It changes students’ perception of what futures are possible and who belongs in intellectual spaces. For many students, the first openly LGBTQ+ adult they meet is an adult at school.”

When it comes to supporting gender-diverse students, Miles of Challenge Success says she wants to dispel the belief that helping them thrive is a zero-sum game.

“I think there’s sometimes a misconception that if we give these students support, then other students aren’t getting support,” she says. “What’s really important is that, by giving students who identify as gender diverse support, everyone benefits, because all students then feel safe to show up — whatever their identities.”

Recently, my kindergartner climbed onto the scale and asked me what dinosaurs also weighed 50 pounds. Thanks to Claude, we quickly learned, to my son’s delight, that he is the size of a juvenile velociraptor.

Artificial intelligence helped me with a question I couldn’t have answered on my own. But it didn’t replace me as a parent or my son’s role as a learner. A few weeks later, I had forgotten the answer, but my son didn’t. He was the keeper of knowledge, and I was the conduit.

Something like this is happening in schools and colleges, too. Information is more easily accessible than ever before. Anyone anywhere can ask an AI tool a question and receive an answer that seems reasonable, at least on the surface. It’s not surprising, then, to see predictions of the demise of traditional schools and colleges.

But education has never been only about access to information. Students need much more to become capable members of society. They need the ability to assess the quality of information, recognize strong work, and connect ideas. Students also need to grapple with the reality that not everyone agrees, and that’s ok. This kind of learning requires human relationships that expose students to the friction of life that sycophantic AI models tend to obscure.

The big question is how to know when AI supports real learning and when it leads to the “cognitive surrender” of accepting AI-generated answers with minimal scrutiny. Recent research findings shed some light on that.

Learning by AI Type

First, learning varies significantly based on the type of AI used. The dangers of cognitive surrender are greater when students use the standard, free versions of LLMs. Those models are designed to be helpful and therefore simply provide answers to the questions they are asked. Brain activity and retained learning are lower when students are working with AI in this way.

In contrast, tools that scaffold learning and support in-person instruction can produce outcomes even more impressive than my son’s memory of the size of teenage dinosaurs. One study of an introductory undergraduate physics course found that students using a carefully designed AI tutor had twice the learning gains of those receiving active, in-person instruction.

Learning Process Matters

Second, the role that AI plays in the learning process matters, and it should be off-limits at times. The authors of the physics course study cautioned that structured AI tutoring may not be appropriate for tasks “requiring complex synthesis of multiple concepts and higher-order critical thinking.” In a larger-scale example, Estonia’s education minister—who is overseeing the country’s ambitious partnership with OpenAI to provide a custom AI platform in upper secondary schools—has described a blended model. Students use handwriting to form memories early in the learning process and, later, use digital tools for feedback and AI-assisted learning. Estonia is not introducing AI in earlier grades so that students can build foundational knowledge and skills first.

Support for Educators Needed

Third, because the outcomes are so far apart between good and bad AI use in learning, educators need support to add AI to their teaching toolkit responsibly. In one study from Sierra Leone, secondary school educators completed a one-day training before adding AI tools in the learning process and only then saw math learning gains equivalent to more than a year of additional schooling.

Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic all offer learning modes and other supports built on these ideas. Still, those features are typically opt-in and getting harder to find for non-enterprise users. OpenAI, for example, launched “study mode” in July 2025 but quietly removed it from the standard ChatGPT interface this spring. The feature remains available to schools and systems with enterprise contracts. These contracts are expensive but drive demand for the types of AI that educators actually want, especially when leaders collaborate across systems and make similar asks of tech companies in procurement.

Schools, colleges, and educators should not be alone in navigating these waters. Philanthropy can help, for example, by supporting training that respects teachers’ expertise, conducting independent research on what works, and advancing advocacy work that counterbalances the size of tech firms. They can also help make enterprise contracts more affordable and support the development of procurement standards that protect learning, student data, and educational institutions’ sovereignty over their own systems.

This fits with philanthropy’s history of helping the benefits of new learning approaches reach everyone. For example, as compulsory schooling laws were passed at the turn of the 20th century, communities benefited from Andrew Carnegie’s 2,509 libraries (many of which served as classrooms) and Julius Rosenwald’s 5,000 schools that educated a third of Black children in the rural South.

Looking even further back in time gives me confidence that humans can weather tech-driven transitions and come out in a better place. German apprenticeship programs are strong today in part because, during the Industrial Revolution, German guilds adapted their models to fit an evolving economy rather than resisting change outright.

Today’s overflowing supply of information began with the printing press, which expanded access to texts and eventually reshaped who could claim expertise. I can capture and share these thoughts with you in part because, very long ago, writing transformed curriculum, credentialing, and information exchange.

Humans may not be as cool as velociraptors, but we have incredible agency and potential to evolve to meet the moment. All of us—including tech providers, educators, and philanthropy—can play an active role in shaping what’s next for students.

Baidu’s robotaxis are heading to the Alps. AmiGo, a venture between the Chinese giant’s Apollo Go robotaxi unit and Swiss Post’s PostBus, has won a special permit from Switzerland’s Federal Roads Office for Level 4 autonomous driving, Baidu said.

Level 4 means the vehicle drives itself within a defined area. Open-road trials began on 1 June across about 80 square kilometres of eastern Switzerland, in the cantons of St Gallen and the two Appenzells. For now, a safety operator still rides in each car.

What AmiGo is

AmiGo pairs Chinese self-driving technology with a Swiss public-transport operator. PostBus runs the country’s distinctive yellow postal buses; Apollo Go supplies the autonomous driving system. Riders book trips through the AmiGo app.

The cars are Apollo Go’s RT6: fully electric pods that carry up to three passengers and pack more than 30 sensors. The steering wheel is built to be removed once the service goes fully driverless. “With AmiGo, we are making automated mobility in public transport tangible,” said PostBus chief executive Stefan Regli.

Why the Apollo Go robotaxi permit matters

The 💜 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol’ founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It’s free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

Europe has almost no robotaxis, and the few efforts are early. Riders still cannot hail one across most of the continent. Uber is only now starting a programme in Munich, and most pilots remain just that.

A Chinese operator winning a European Level 4 permit is a notable first. It also extends Apollo Go’s reach beyond China, where it ran into trouble in Wuhan when a fleet froze in traffic.

The numbers behind the push

Apollo Go is scaling fast. Baidu says the service delivered 3.2 million fully driverless rides in the first quarter of 2026, peaking above 350,000 in a single week in March. Cumulative rides passed 22 million by April, across 27 cities.

That scale is the pitch to European regulators and partners alike. But the Swiss permit is narrow and the trial zone small. The partners are clear about the path: a closed user trial, then rides with no safety operator, then regular service from 2027, in what they call the largest planned automated public-transport operation of its kind in Europe. Chinese rivals are expanding too, and Europe’s patchwork of national rules still makes every market a fresh fight. The question is whether a careful Swiss pilot becomes a template, or stays a postcard.

Meta had a bad Friday morning. A major Meta outage knocked out Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger for users around the world, starting shortly before 10am ET. By midday it was recovering, unevenly, region by region.

The trouble appeared to begin on WhatsApp, then spread. Facebook users were abruptly logged out, met with a “Query Error” or a “Sorry, something went wrong” message, and unable to log back in. Others could open the app but not post, comment, react, search, or load Stories and Marketplace.

What Down Detector shows

The outage-tracking site Down Detector logged a sharp spike. Facebook bore the brunt, with reports passing 130,000; Instagram logged around 9,500, and WhatsApp far fewer. Across all three, most people flagged problems with the app, then login.

Those numbers are self-reported, so they track complaints, not Meta’s own data. But the reports came in from far beyond the US, from the Philippines and Taiwan to Australia, Spain, and South Africa, which points to something central rather than a local glitch.

Businesses caught out

The 💜 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol’ founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It’s free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

It was not just scrolling. Meta’s status page logged “high disruptions” across its business products, including Facebook Ads Manager, the Messenger Platform, the Messenger API for Instagram, and the WhatsApp Business Platform. Advertisers could not create or edit ads, and Meta apologised “for any inconvenience.” On a Friday, the timing stung.

Meta confirms the disruption, but not the cause

Meta acknowledged the problems on its status page, flagging “high disruptions” and saying its engineering teams were “actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.” It did not say what caused the outage, or how many users were hit.

There is no word yet on whether it was a configuration error, an infrastructure failure, or something else.

Recovery was already under way. Meta marked some services, such as ad delivery, as resolved, with others “in the process of being restored.” On the consumer side, Facebook was loading closer to normal and Down Detector reports were falling, though some users still saw an empty Stories bar, a stale feed, or a “Try Again” error.

The scale is the point: Meta’s apps reach billions, and even a couple of hours offline ripples through messaging, businesses, and logins far beyond the feed. It capped an eventful day for Meta, which this morning pledged free AI glasses to every blind US veteran. This is a developing story; we will update it with Meta’s explanation and an all-clear.

from the going-great,-thanks-for-asking dept

Back in March I noted how the Trump FCC under Brendan Carr had announced a “new ban” on all routers made overseas (which is pretty much all of them). At the time we also noted how this was less of a ban and more of a shakedown, with router manufacturers required to beg the Trump FCC for conditional waivers (fees, favors, whatever) to continue doing business in the States.

Several router manufacturers (like Amazon’s Eero and Netgear) have subsequently received exemptions from the Trump administration, but because there is zero transparency to the process, we have no idea what they agreed to. Did they pay the Trump administration a bribe? Did they agree to surveillance backdoors for ICE operations? Who knows? Great stuff.

Now the cable lobby appears to be balking at the purported foreign router ban. In a petition filed with the FCC last week (spotted by Ars Technica) NCTA (The Internet & Television Association) — the cable industry’s biggest lobbying org — asked for a massive exemption from the restrictions, noting that they’re simply not practical in real-world practice:

“NCTA requests an expedited grant of this waiver to enable its members and their suppliers to navigate unavoidable supply chain shortages and prevent disruptions in the availability of broadband for NCTA members’ customers, while still fulfilling the rules’ national security and public safety purpose.”

So basically you’ve got a ban on foreign routers that is more about extortion than protecting national security. Which the cable industry says it can’t adhere to because AI hype, tariffs and unnecessary wars have driven up the costs of many internal router components, making adherence expensive if not impossible. Great stuff, very savvy policymaking by people who definitely know what they’re doing.

Part of the “foreign router ban” was supposed to involve forcing hardware manufacturing to return to the states. But because Trump and much of his administration have a fourth-grader-level understanding about how this stuff works (like his desire to suddenly have smartphones built in the U.S.), the cable industry’s filing notes that the “onshoring” of manufacturing and supply chains isn’t realistically possible either:

“Like AT&T, NCTA members are encouraging their suppliers to quickly pursue required onshoring, and, in the meantime, seek Conditional Approvals for Covered Routers as necessary. However, unavoidable supply chain shortages in critical substrate material and memory modules (including both volatile and nonvolatile memory) significantly constrain the industry. AT&T’s suppliers are not unique; the same impediments they are experiencing impose inevitable limitations on NCTA’s suppliers. Accordingly, NCTA seeks the same relief on behalf of its suppliers. Given the immediacy of these issues and the concrete harms that would result from disruptions to the availability of broadband to large swaths of US consumers and businesses, the grant of this Petition is warranted.”

These companies, many of which supported and enabled Trump, now have to pretend this all makes sense as they navigate a costly minefield of weird bullshit that won’t accomplish any of its purported goals.

This is all exceptionally chaotic and dumb, and it’s unlikely that Brendan Carr, who spends most of his time trying to censor comedians and whining about “wokeness,” is capable of managing the scale of this sort of overhaul — even if it were practical, which it isn’t.

When you read most press coverage of this router ban, they don’t really make it clear to readers that this is all very unworkable and stupid. Trump and his administration are given undeserved credit on competency and policy, as the press, companies, and policymakers all try to trip over themselves to normalize the sheer pointless stupidity and expense of it all.

If the country cared about national security we’d focus on corruption. We’d pass a meaningful modern internet privacy law. We’d shore up, staff, and properly fund cybersecurity regulators. We’d regulate data brokers. Instead we get a giant pile of unworkable extortion slop being overseen by weird zealots.

Filed Under: brendan carr, hardware, national security, onshoring, privacy, router ban, routers, telecom

Companies: ncta

OFFBEAT

It might also make Musk the world’s first trillionaire

SpaceX has priced its blockbuster initial public offering at $135 a share, raising $75 billion and valuing Elon Musk’s rocket biz at roughly $1.78 trillion.

The haul could rise to about $86 billion if underwriters exercise their option to buy more stock, making it the largest IPO in US history.

The company confirmed [PDF] that 555.6 million shares of Class A common stock were sold in the offering, with another 83.3 million available to underwriters.

SpaceX is a loss-making company. In its Form S-1, filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, it divided operations into Space (Falcon 9 and the like), Connectivity (Starlink), and AI. Only the Connectivity segment is turning a profit, to the tune of $4.4 billion in 2025, while the others continue to rack up losses. Making a profit from AI continues to elude many companies – SpaceX is not the only entity where investment exceeds revenue, and Starship remains a work in progress.

In the company’s Form S-1, SpaceX reported a net loss of $4.9 billion on revenue of $18.7 billion in 2025. The IPO values the company at more than 90 times that revenue.

According to The Financial Times, the IPO was heavily oversubscribed – orders exceeded the number of shares on offer by more than three times. Retail investors also ordered more than $100 billion of shares, and were allocated between 20 and 25 percent of the shares sold.

The record-breaking IPO reflects investor appetite for AI-related companies, as well as a bet that SpaceX’s estimate of a $28.5 trillion total addressable market, including $22.7 trillion in “Enterprise Applications,” proves realistic.

Skeptics may recall that promises and assurances associated with Elon Musk rarely survive contact with reality.

We will update when trading kicks off today. Depending on how trading goes, Musk could be a paper trillionaire by the end of the day, thanks to his shares in SpaceX. That figure could climb further if SpaceX ever delivers on its more ambitious plans, from a human settlement on Mars to space-based datacenters.

Musk may also be in line for a vast Tesla payout if the carmaker hits targets including a sharp rise in valuation and the delivery of a million robots over the next decade. ®

• NordVPN’s next-gen antivirus blocked 96% of phishing sites in the 2026 AV-Comparatives test
• The software perfectly distinguished between active malicious links and 200 legitimate banking URLs
• Detection rates jumped by 6% compared to the previous test in May 2025

When you’re searching for the best VPN to secure your online traffic, you increasingly need an app that does more than just encrypt your data. As phishing attacks grow more sophisticated, top providers are evolving into robust, all-in-one cybersecurity suites, and independent testing shows these built-in tools are making a real impact.

In the newly released 2026 Anti-Phishing Comparative Test by independent cybersecurity evaluation authority AV-Comparatives, NordVPN’s next-generation antivirus achieved a massive 96% phishing detection rate.