Next month, the window will officially be open for a NASA manned flight that will circumnavigate Earth’s closest celestial partner to track potential landing sites for an official moon landing.

Students in Florida are falling behind the rest of the nation when it comes to reading. The most recent Report Card from The NAEP says this.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that an S4 (severe) solar radiation storm is in progress. NOAA’s GOES-19 satellite measurements show the ongoing solar radiation storm has intensified to Severe (S4) on the NOAA Space Weather Scales, and it is still increasing.

Doctors are getting a major boost in the battle against breast cancer thanks to Artificial Intelligence.

With Florida’s citrus industry declining, it’s important for growers to have robust backup crops to prevent financial loss. Dr. Zhanao Deng and his team with the University of Florida are decoding blackberry DNA to help Floridian growers.

The Florida International Air Show Board of Directors says that due to the ongoing federal government shutdown, the U.S. Air Force F-16 Viper Demo & Heritage Demo Teams will be unable to perform at this weekend’s Air Show, November 1–2.

Frontier AI Models are the ones that are highly capable and best represent advancements in language processing, reasoning, and multimodal capabilities. They are on the cutting edge of AI development. Many experts warn Frontier Models could potentially pose risks to public safety, and could have dangerous capabilities. The Frontier Model Forum is an industry-supported non-profit focused on addressing these significant risks to public safety and even national security. Its members currently include Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI. Its core mandates are to identify best practices and support standards development, and to advance science and independent research in the field of AI. We meet its Executive Director, Chris Meserole.

Florida Gulf Coast University’s new Dendritic Institute is designed to bring artificial intelligence to students, staff and faculty. With AI’s common use in all levels of education, ethical questions form as educators see outcomes, some negative, for students.

WMFE in Orlando — now called Central Florida Public Media — slowed its coverage of space after the Shuttle Program ended in 2011, but at the end of 2014 they covered the first, uncrewed flight of NASA’s Orion spacecraft — which is part of the Artemis lunar mission — and WMFE’s Brendan Byrne covered it. That story pretty much launched his career covering space, including hosting a podcast called Are We There Yet? which we now air on Saturday evenings at 7:30 on WGCU-FM. So, we thought it would be a good time to get to know him and the show.

The idea for an AI Institute at Florida Gulf Coast University dates back to before OpenAI released ChatGPT in the fall of 2022. Founded in Aug. 2023, the FGCU Dendritic Institute is a hub for all things AI and data science, from research to education to community outreach. FGCU recently announced a multi-year initiative focusing on responsible, ethical and practical use of AI to enhance teaching, learning, researching and collaborating, so we sit down with the Dendritic Institute's founding director Dr. Leandro de Castro to get the Institute’s origin story and what lies ahead.