1. The hundred year starship project. A new DARPA initiative to explore what it would take to develop interstellar travel over the next hundred years.

2. The genetics of happiness. Recent research suggests that about one-third of the variation in people’s happiness levels is heritable. The gene which seems to account for increased happiness was found least often among those of Asian ancestry and most often among those of African ancestry, with Europeans falling in the middle.

3. More jobs for machines, not people. Machines are predicted to take over more and more of the things that people have usually done.

4. Aged Wisdom.

You might look inside yourself and think you know yourself, but over many decades you can change in ways you won’t see ahead of time. Don’t assume you know who you will become. This applies all the more to folks around you. You may know who they are now, but not who they will become.

5. How Brazil Is Sending 75,000 Students to the World’s Best Colleges.

“Brazilians have gotten used to going abroad for tourism, business, shopping and diplomacy. Now their students are finally getting an incentive to see the world, thanks to a major government program that aims to award 75,000 scholarships to attend the world’s top universities. Available only to Brazilians studying subjects of strategic national importance, like engineering, they reflect “an effort by the government to take a quantum leap in the formation of a scientific and technological elite,” says Aloizio Mercadante, Brazil’s Science and Technology Minister.”

The United States government would be well-served by doing something to incentivize more people to study STEM fields — perhaps better student loan terms for STEM majors, and making the amount of student loan money available for non-STEM majors proportional to the average salaries for people with that major.