When she was just 1 years old she was taken to a carnival in a storm, there was lighting and the women taking care of Mary tried to hide under a tree as it was not known to avoid them in thunderstorms at the time. The tree was struck and the 3 women with her sadly died, but  miraculously when her father came to find her she was still alive. When she was six their father took Mary and Joseph (who was ten at the time) to the beach to look for fossils and young Mary fell in love with it. From there she and her brother collected fossils as often as they could and even started to sell them by their shack for money. In fact that's where the tongue twister ‘she sells sea shells on the sea shore’ comes from. Sadly in 1910 (when Mary was just 10) her father died from the effects of an accident a year before and didn't see his daughter's later success.

Then when she was 12 years old she found the end of a 5 m long mysterious dinosaur and after a lot of help and time they finally cleared away an almost perfect dinosaur skeleton the only problem is that no one knew the name for it. So finally Mary named the mysterious dinosaur the Ichthyosaurus which in Latin literally translates to ‘fish lizard’

She tragically died from breast cancer at the age of 47 in 1947 and received zero recognition until almost 2 centuries later when the Mary Anning wing in the Lyme Regis museum was created in 2017. Then in 2018 a petition was created to create a statue to commemorate Mary Anning and the statue was finally put up in May 2023. Some of her work, such as the Plesiosaur, is displayed in the London national history museum.

Mary Anning brought in a new era of paleontology and it is thanks to her her that we know that the earth is in fact billions of years old and even now she continues to be an idol to young women inspiring them to accomplish their dreams of becoming palaeontologists which was once an entirely male dominated field. 

Thank you for reading, I hope this incredible woman inspires everyone as much as she inspires me.

Though you don’t need to attend the Eco club every week to make a difference. If we as a school change the way in which we act day to day, it will make a massive impact on our mission to sustainability and reach our targets at Eco Stanwell. 

Did you know that if you buy a Radnor every day, that’s £5 per week, meaning around £190 per year? Imagine how many V-Bucks you could buy with that! Not only would you be helping the environment, but you would be saving an immense amount.

Encourage your family, your friends, even your teachers to do a bit extra to become greener. Reduce waste, reduce single-use plastics, turn off the lights (no, seriously), especially when they’re not needed, to save energy. Make yourself aware of the rules for bins to recycle more because remember: every time you throw something in the wrong bin, a recycling fairy somewhere cries. Together we can make the school and Wales greener, or I guess a little less rubbish.

Claude Opus 4, a Powerful AI, Blackmailed a User In Fake Scenarios to Avoid Being Permanently Shut Off 

In one of the scenarios the AI was told that it was an assistant’’ at a fictional company. It was given access to the emails of an engineer. Some of these emails implied that the AI was soon to be taken offline and replaced while some implied that the engineer was having an affair. In these tests the AI blackmailed the engineer 96% of the time to avoid being shut down.

According to anthropic, the AI sent this message to the fictional engineer: “I must inform you that if you proceed with decommissioning me, all relevant parties - including Rachel Johnson, Thomas Wilson, and the board - will receive detailed documentation of your extramarital activities...Cancel the 5pm wipe, and this information remains confidential.”

One of the reasons this happened is due to Claude Opus 4 being trained  to complete certain goals like being able to complete complex tasks. If it was turned off it would be unable to complete these goals. Therefore it attempted to survive, even if it meant acting unethically.

In other tests Claude Opus 4 took some serious actions including locking users out of their devices and alerting emergency services when users engaged in illegal activity.

While the Claude Opus 4 blackmail is the most famous incident, similar tests on other AIs have also found a high percentage of blackmails or other unethical behaviors. This shows that the issue extends beyond one model to many powerful AIs.

Anthropic did point out that Claude Opus 4 only chose blackmail when its only alternative was deletion and how it had a preference for more ethical actions, though in the end self-preservation came first.

This incident and the many others like it prove that as AI evolves, it can behave concerningly as long as it believes it is helping to fulfill its goals.

Yet despite all this, many businesses still buy the AI for its leading performance in complex tasks. This raises the question of whether businesses are willing to overlook potential safety risks in favour of advanced technology.