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The vast distances between stars make interstellar travel one of humanity’s most daunting challenges. Even the Voyager spacecrafts, now in interstellar space, would take tens of thousands of years to reach the nearest star, Alpha Centauri. To put this into perspective, Alpha Centauri is 277,000 astronomical units (AU) away—over 7,000 times the distance from Earth to Pluto. At current spacecraft speeds, a journey to our stellar neighbor would take an unimaginable 70,000 years. However, new ideas like the Sunbeam Mission offer a promising path forward, proposing innovative propulsion techniques that could shorten this timeline to mere decades.

The Sunbeam Mission centers around relativistic electron beam propulsion, where high-energy electron beams, accelerated close to the speed of light, push a spacecraft forward. This approach eliminates the need for onboard fuel, reducing the spacecraft’s mass and enabling greater acceleration. A stationary satellite, or statite, positioned near the Sun, would generate these electron beams by converting solar energy into electricity. Using materials and technologies like those developed for NASA’s Parker Solar Probe and European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter, the statite could endure the Sun’s intense heat while directing the beam over vast distances. This could propel a spacecraft to 10% of the speed of light, allowing it to reach Alpha Centauri in about 40 years.

While the concept is ambitious, its challenges—like generating and maintaining the beam, energy conversion, spacecraft navigation, material durability, and beam focus—are not insurmountable. Current technologies, such as the Large Hadron Collider, high-temperature solar converters, and advanced heat-resistant materials, provide a foundation for overcoming these hurdles. Innovations in adaptive optics and laser communication systems also offer insights into managing beam precision over interstellar distances, demonstrating how existing advancements could be adapted for this revolutionary mission.

Continue reading “Huge Interstellar Leap: Scientists Announce Stunning Plan to Reach Alpha Centauri in Our Lifetime” | >

What it eats: The carcasses of dead animals.

Why it’s awesome: These scavenger birds have an unexpected way of keeping predators away — by projectile vomiting stomach acid and semi-digested meat at their attackers.

Turkey vultures live in a range of habitats, including subtropical forests, shrublands and deserts. They have bald heads so that when they feast on carcasses, blood and guts don’t get trapped in their feathers.

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I had a conversation with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and we spoke about groundbreaking developments in physical AI and other big announcements made at CES. Jensen discusses how NVIDIA Cosmos and Omniverse are revolutionizing robot training, enabling machines to understand the physical world and learn in virtual environments — reducing training time from years to hours.

He shares insights on NVIDIA DRIVE AI’s autonomous vehicle developments, including their major partnership with Toyota, and talks about the critical role of safety in their three-computer system approach.

Jensen also shares what he considers to be the most impactful technology of our time! This conversation left me feeling excited for the future of technology and where we’re headed. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Timestamps:

Continue reading “NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang on Robotics, AI, And The Next Big Emerging Technologies” | >

Exploring the most important questions we face as we age.

Dr. Debra Whitman, Ph.D. is Executive Vice President and Chief Public Policy Officer, at AARP (https://www.aarp.org/) where she leads policy development, analysis and research, as well as global thought leadership supporting and advancing the interests of individuals age 50-plus and their families. She oversees AARP’s Public Policy Institute, AARP Research, Office of Policy Development and Integration, Thought Leadership, and AARP International.

Dr. Whitman is an authority on aging issues with extensive experience in national policy making, domestic and international research, and the political process. An economist, she is a strategic thinker whose career has been dedicated to solving problems affecting economic and health security, and other issues related to population aging.

Continue reading “Dr. Debra Whitman, Ph.D. — Chief Public Policy Officer, AARP — Author, The Second Fifty” | >

Improving Global Resilience Against Emerging Infectious Threats — Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, MD — Founding Director, Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases (CEID), Boston University.

Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, MD, MALD is a board-certified infectious diseases physician who is the Founding Director of BU Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases (https://www.bu.edu/ceid/about-the-cen…) as well an Associate Professor at the BU School of Medicine. She served the Senior Policy Advisor for Global COVID-19 Response for the White House COVID-19 Response Team in 2022–2023, where she coordinated the interagency programs for global COVID-19 vaccine donations from the United States and was the policy lead for Project NextGen, $5B HHS program aimed at developing next generation vaccines and treatments for pandemic prone coronaviruses. She also served as the interim Testing Coordinator for the White House MPOX Response Team. She is the Director and co-founder of Biothreats Emergence, Analysis and Communications Network (BEACON), an open source outbreak surveillance program.

Between 2011–2021, Dr. Bhadelia helped develop and then served as the medical director of the Special Pathogens Unit (SPU) at Boston Medical Center, a medical unit designed to care for patients with highly communicable diseases, and a state designated Ebola Treatment Center. She was previously an associate director for BU’s maximum containment research program, the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories. She has provided direct patient care and been part of outbreak response and medical countermeasures research during multiple Ebola virus disease outbreaks in West and East Africa between 2014–2019. She was the clinical lead for a DoD-funded viral hemorrhagic fever clinical research unit in Uganda, entitled Joint Mobile Emerging Disease Intervention Clinical Capability (JMEDICC) program between 2017 and 2022. Currently, she is a co-director of Fogarty funded, BU-University of Liberia Emerging and Epidemic Viruses Research training program. She was a member of the World Health Organization(WHO)’s Technical Advisory Group on Universal Health and Preparedness Review (UHPR). She currently serves as a member of the National Academies Forum on Microbial Threats and previously served as the chair of the National Academies Workshop Committee for Potential Research Priorities to Inform Readiness and Response to Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza A (H5N1) and member of the Ad Hoc Committee on Current State of Research, Development, and Stockpiling of Smallpox Medical Countermeasures.

Continue reading “Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, MD — Founding Director, BU Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases (CEID)” | >

Modern AI systems have fulfilled Turing’s vision of machines that learn and converse like humans, but challenges remain. A new paper highlights concerns about energy consumption and societal inequality while calling for more robust AI testing to ensure ethical and sustainable progress.

A perspective published on November 13 in Intelligent Computing, a Science Partner Journal, argues that modern artificial intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science focused on creating systems that can perform tasks typically requiring human intelligence. These tasks include understanding natural language, recognizing patterns, solving problems, and learning from experience. AI technologies use algorithms and massive amounts of data to train models that can make decisions, automate processes, and improve over time through machine learning. The applications of AI are diverse, impacting fields such as healthcare, finance, automotive, and entertainment, fundamentally changing the way we interact with technology.

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