A new portal in Louisiana is designed to bring more underrepresented students into dual-enrollment programs where students can earn college credits or even an associate degree while still in high school. The goal is to offer more job-ready career pathways.

Hippos make distinctive noises known as wheeze-honks that help them identify each other, a study in Current Biology suggests. "This recognition ability supports the social relationships between individuals," says Nicolas Mathevon, who led the research.

NASA's shiny new space telescope has entered orbit L2 around the sun after traveling nearly a million miles since it launched on Dec. 25. The James Webb Space Telescope is expected to start sending back its first images sometime this summer after spending the next few months undergoing instrument calibrations.

The gut can tell the difference between sugar and artificial sweeteners, and it communicates with the brain about them using different neural pathways, according to findings reported in Nature Neuroscience. Researchers monitored how the vagus nerve would take up sugar and artificial sweetener in mice via calcium imaging and found that neurons responded more strongly to sugar.

Two massive statues in the image of King Amenhotep III, the grandfather of King Tutankhamun, have been found in Egypt. The statues look like sphinxes, according to officials with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, and were found alongside three statues of Sakhmet, a goddess who is depicted with the body of a woman and the head of a lion.

A career and technical education program launched by the nonprofit Community College Growth Engine Fund requires students to learn career skills, as well as "21st century skills," including empathy, resilience and creative problem solving. The program is being used at six community college systems across the US, while also expanding to serve working adults at other colleges.

Third-grade science students from Incline Village, Calif., planted approximately 30 sugar pine trees as part of a conservation and restoration lesson. Teacher Debbie Kadziauskas said the students learned about the life cycle and planting needs of the trees before the outing, and will return to the area to monitor the growth of the trees.

Students with autism learn STEM skills such as coding and programming in an environment tailored to their needs at the Science Prep Academy in Arizona. The school, considered to be the first of its kind, is intended to nurture neurodiverse students and help them leverage their skills in fields such as physics, says educator and founder Kenneth Mims.

Eight students at a Tennessee high school are preparing to continue their career education in colleges after earning credentials to work as certified nursing assistants. The certification required a mix of academic and clinical work.

Scientists say they can determine a person's biological age by looking in their eyes and calculate their risk for early death by comparing their biological age and their chronological age. Researchers used a deep-learning model to examine images of the retinas of people and found that many participants had significant differences between their two ages, according to data in the British Journal of Ophthalmology.