Imagine graduating with a liberal arts degree as the age of AI dawns. That's the mindset I faced when addressing the Temple University College of Liberal Arts (where I'm an alum) earlier this month. Truth be told, no one knows what will happen with AI, including those who are building it. I took an optimistic view based on one core truth: As amazing as AI might become, by definition it cannot be human, and therefore the human connection we homo sapiens forge with each other is unique'and gives us an edge. I am thrilled to address the Temple College of Liberal Arts Class of 2025. You have prevailed under the curse of living in interesting times. You coped with Covid in high school and your early years here, navigated your way through the noise of social media, and now face a troubling political climate. The last part of that resonates with me. I attended Temple University at a time of national unrest. Richard Nixon was our president, the war was raging in Vietnam, and the future seemed uncertain....

This time, it's not just superpowers racing to plant flags, but also private companies, multinational partnerships and robotic scouts aiming to unlock the Moon's secrets and lay the groundwork for future human return. So far in 2025, lunar exploration has surged forward. Several notable missions have launched toward or landed on the Moon. Each has navigated the long journey through space and the even trickier descent to the Moon's surface or into orbit with varying degrees of success. Together, these missions reflect both the promise and difficulty of returning to the Moon in this new space race defined by innovation, competition and collaboration. As an aerospace engineer specializing in guidance, navigation and control technologies, I'm deeply interested in how each mission ' whether successful or not ' adds to scientists' collective understanding. These missions can help engineers learn to navigate the complexities of space, operate in hostile lunar environments and steadily advance toward a sustainable human presence on the Moon....

Richard Garwin, who died on May 13, 2025, at the age of 97, was sometimes called 'the most influential scientist you've never heard of.' He got his Ph.D. in physics at 21 under Enrico Fermi ' a Nobel Prize winner and friend of Einstein's ' who called Garwin 'the only true genius' he'd ever met. A polymath curious about almost everything, he was one of the few people elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine for pathbreaking contributions in all of those fields. He held 47 patents and published over 500 scientific papers. A giant trove of his papers and talks can be found in the Garwin Archive at the Federation of American Scientists. Garwin was best known for having done the engineering design for the first-ever thermonuclear explosion, turning the Teller-Ulam idea of triggering a fusion reaction with radiation pressure into a working hydrogen bomb ' one with roughly 700 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. He did that over the summer when he was 23. Over the decades that followed, he contributed to countless other military advances, including inventing key technology that enabled reconnaissance satellites....

Historically dominated by pension funds, endowments, and sovereign wealth vehicles, private equity is now welcoming individual investors into its universe, often through new product structures tailored to smaller ticket sizes and periodic liquidity. While the opportunity is real, so are the risks. Retail investors are drawn by the promise of accessing high-growth private companies that are staying private longer and by the smoother volatility profile that private assets can offer. Buyout strategies are also increasingly viewed as a counterbalance to public equity concentration risks. However, industry experts caution that many retail-focused offerings can obscure the full cost of investment. Despite headline fees advertised as low as 1%, deeper layers of charges including overheads, legal expenses, and performance fees can push average lifetime costs to nearly 24%, according to Harvard research cited in the article. That translates to an annualised drag of nearly 8% on performance. Liquidity risk also looms large. Recent examples like Blackstone's BREIT, which was forced to limit redemptions amid a surge in withdrawals, highlight the tension between investor expectations and the underlying illiquidity of private assets. Despite new fund formats including KKR and Capital Group's hybrid interval funds and Apollo's ETF-style products, industry redemptions as a share of NAV fell to a 10-year low, reflecting limited exit activity....