📌 TOPINDIATOURS Update ai: Billionaire NASA Head Offers Bizarre Perk for Top Staff

It took almost a year for the Trump administration to settle on a non-interim NASA administrator.

Back in 2024, before he was even sworn in, president Donald Trump announced that billionaire tech founder and SpaceX space tourist Jared Isaacman would take the helm of the space agency — only to change his mind after months of bureaucratic chaos, poorly implemented budget cuts, and a major falling out with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.

A year later, though, Trump came around again on Isaacman, who was finally confirmed by the Senate by a 67-to-30 vote on December 17, promising to bring an agency in crisis back on track.

The entrepreneur, who owns a point-of-sale payments company and has little in the way of traditional credentials or experience for the job, is unlikely to be a conventional NASA head.

Exactly how that will play out is hard to say at this point, but in the face of a chaotic morale environment at the agency, where staff have watched in frustrationas the agency’s operations have been thrown into disarray by the Trump administration, he’s clearly willing to try to deploy some unusual perks.

As NASA press secretary Bethany Stevens noted on Musk’s social media platform X-formerly-Twitter, Isaacman has offered to fly members of NASA’s workforce on his “privately-owned F-5 aircraft.”

“All costs associated with these flights are covered by the Administrator, with zero burden to the taxpayer,” Stevens promised. “If you are an accomplished NASA employee doing exceptional work, there will be opportunities ahead to take to the skies with the NASA administration.”

While possibly meant as a peace offering, it comes across as a bit tone-deaf given NASA’s current state. Congress is desperately trying to defend the agency’s future, staunchly opposing the White House’s proposed 2026 budget, which would deal NASA a devastating blow. Isaacman has yet to personally address the glaring issue.

The Trump administration has also been shutting entire buildings and over 100 labs at NASA’s iconic Goddard Space Flight Center, to the horror of current and former staffers.

In other words, joyrides on Isaacman’s privately-owned fighter jet might bring some sound and fury to staffers’ lives — but they’re already dealing with plenty of that in the workforce.

On a more optimistic note, Isaacman — whose net worth is estimated to be well north of $1 billion — also announced that he would be donating his $221,900 annual salary to Space Camp. That’s a far more meaningful offer that could realistically make a more tangible difference to “inspire the next generation to take an interest in STEM fields and contribute to the greatest adventure in human history,” per Stevens.

One thing’s for sure: Isaacmanis is inheriting a strange situation. Earlier this week, he accompanied the president’s son, Eric Trump, and his wife for a trip on board two fighter jets over NASA’s Kennedy Space Center — as staffers continue to reel from a chaotic year back on the ground, hoping that things won’t unravel even further.

More on Isaacman: New NASA Director Taking Over Agency in Crisis

The post Billionaire NASA Head Offers Bizarre Perk for Top Staff appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com

📌 TOPINDIATOURS Breaking ai: From Romans to the Normans: Medieval Europeans moved

A major bioarcheological study of ancient teeth revealed groundbreaking information about early medieval migrants that will change the history books.

Researchers at the Universities of Edinburgh and Cambridge conducted the first large-scale analysis of isotopic and ancient DNA data in cemeteries from early medieval England to assess their migration patterns, according to a press release by the University of Edinburgh.

Ancient tooth enamel revealed that early medieval migrants came to England through the Mediterranean and from the Arctic Circle and beyond, according to a new study published in Medieval Archaeology.

Those specifics aside, more stunningly, researchers discovered that these brave, early explorers of new worlds demonstrated a different way of moving than had been previously understood.

The major study debunked what could now be called the myth that migration occurred in intense spurts over time, with “a significant spike,” according to the press release, in the 7th and 8th centuries. The team found that it happened as a continuous flow.

Their teeth even possessed a snapshot of periods of climate change.

Medieval Europeans moved to England consistently

A press release by the University of Cambridge continued that researchers studied more than 700 chemical signatures from the teeth of people buried in England between AD 400 and 1100.

They then cross-examined the data with ancient DNA from 316 individuals to compare movement patterns with ancestry, as stated in the press release.

By zeroing in on their tooth enamel, researchers were able to crack open their eating habits and how they differed from local customs, allowing them to begin to assemble a picture of these migrants.

They gathered the main sources that documented their movements, such as Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, to determine how their data lined up with these records.

“The study took a ‘big data’ approach to assess the narratives around early medieval migration. We see here that migration was a consistent feature rather than just tied to one-off events, with evidence of communities in continual cross-cultural contact, tied into large-scale networks which may have contributed to the major socio-cultural changes we see throughout the period,” Dr. Sam Leggett from the School of History, Classics and Archaeology stated in a press release.

Medieval migration did not happen in spurts

They found migration didn’t “start and stop,” but rather continued over time with a dominant demographic of males. Although women from North East, Kent, and Wessex appeared to want to leave their hometowns for a new world, specifically.

Furthermore, they saw significant movement from Wales, Ireland, Northwest Europe, and the Mediterranean.

The study made a significant contribution, if not clarification, to this academic niche — medieval migration wasn’t seasonal, nor sporadic and intense. The teeth also captured climate shifts such as the Late Antique Little Ice Age and the Medieval Climate Anomaly, which might have encouraged some increase in migration into England.

Lastly, as Archaeology News reported, Britain was never isolated from the rest of the continent, and it was connected to distant regions, too. It turns out that Europe had strong ties with England, and that Europeans flowed into the country more consistently than researchers previously understood.

The research is published Open Access in Medieval Archaeology.

🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com