UCF in the News

A UCF faculty member President Trump nominated for NASA chief financial officer sees the moon as a stepping stone to Mars but warns the U.S. needs to fix its space game if it’s going to outplay China. Trump tapped Greg Autry on Monday for the post. He joined the university in 2024 as associate provost for Space Commercialization and Strategy. “I have been honored to help move UCF’s incredible space enterprise forward, and I hope to return after my service at NASA,” Autry said in a news release. “Our space agency has a long history of excellence in financial management, and I am looking forward to joining the incredible team at NASA.” Autry worked with the first Trump administration as part of the White House transition team for NASA. In 2016, he helped lay out NASA’s plans to return to the moon through its Artemis program.

Expected to unlock new possibilities for human spaceflight, Fram2 will take four first-time astronauts to explore our planet and its polar regions."This mission, the Fram2 mission, is going to be the first all-civilian free-flyer mission to orbit the poles of Earth, which makes it very unique," Dr. Emmanuel Urquieta said. He is the vice chair of Aerospace Medicine and an associate professor of medicine at the University of Central Florida. With the exception of the Apollo missions, our North and South poles have not been fully visible to other astronauts. "What makes this mission very unique is that the last humans exposed to galactic radiation were the Apollo astronauts," Urquieta said. The name Fram2 comes from an expedition dating back to 1893. The Norwegian ship Fram was built specifically for exploring the Arctic and Antarctic. The crew will even carry a piece from that ship aboard the mission.

The health care industry has integrated AI to enhance diagnostics and efficiency. Human oversight remains crucial for patient safety and data security. Over 900 AI tools have been approved by the FDA for medical use. Data-driven artificial intelligence (AI) tools are changing the way health care workers help patients. Orlando Business Journal spoke with health care professionals at Nemours, Orlando Health, AdventHealth, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and University of Central Florida about the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats surrounding AI in health care. AI tools can't be relied upon alone to replace health care professionals' medical knowledge and experience, since any given decision could be the difference between life and death. "The health care provider is the trained content expert,” said Richard Zraick, a speech language pathologist and founding director of the University of Central Florida's School of Communication Sciences and Disorders. “They have the knowledge, the expertise and the clinical experience to know what it is and what questions they're supposed to ask, and they know if the answers they're getting [from AI] make sense or not for an individual patient, because health care is highly individualized.” Zraick sees the importance of focusing on personalized medicine regularly while working with speech-impaired patients. AI is being used to analyze speech patterns and validate what he’s hearing with his own ears. The emergence of data-driven AI in health care has the potential to energize a new generation of aspiring doctors, physicians and nurses, and perhaps more importantly, empower patients to have more access and understanding of their own care. “We are living in this exciting age where we are seeing a lot of successful stories with how AI is able to change our daily lives, but in health care it’s only scratching the surface,” said Chen Chen, an associate professor at UCF’s Center for Research in Computer Vision. “Nurse practitioners spend a lot of time charting at the nursing station, so these AI tools can enhance their efficiency so they can spend more time with the patients.”

Cursive is a style of writing where the letters and characters are connected. It requires a level of penmanship and knowledge to interpret and execute the fluidity of the words. Some of the most important historic documents like the Declaration of Independence are written in it. This morning, a Florida House Education committee approved and advanced a bill requiring public school students learn and be proficient in cursive by the end of fifth grade. Currently, the state requires cursive instruction but there is no testing proving comprehension. The bill sponsor, Republican Toby Overdorf, joins Engage to talk about why this is a priority for him during the legislative session. Enrique Puig, Director of the Morgridge International Reading Center at UCF, joins Engage to talk about the developmental benefits of learning cursive. He also has experience teaching in K-12 classrooms and literary coaching.

Although the quest to develop lunarcrete presents significant challenges and will doubtless require time to perfect, the search is yielding benefits for both Moon- and Earth-based construction. The extreme lunar environment, which includes dramatic temperature swings, microgravity, and radiation, necessitates the utilization of only the most robust materials. Developing new building products that can withstand such a harsh environment also has advantages for our planet. The lessons uncovered about alternative feedstocks can also present new opportunities. For example, the LSU researchers have noted that some areas in the Middle East contain high quantities of sulfur. Thus, their sulfur-based waterless concrete could be a preferred candidate for in-situ casting in this arid region. “This [technology] is great for people out there working on another planet who don’t have a lot of support,” said Philip Metzger, a physicist at the University of Central Florida. “But there are already plenty of analogues to that here on Earth.”

The University of Central Florida’s online English program can be quite the bargain for students who live in the Sunshine State, boasting in-state tuition of just under $180 per credit. More than 90% of the UCF student body stays enrolled between their first and second years, and nearly 80% of students graduate. Students in this program can choose from technical communication, literature or creative writing tracks, which may appeal to English majors with career aspirations in one of these three areas.

Several years back, many in the crypto community described Bitcoin as a “safe-haven” asset. Fewer are calling it that today. A safe-haven asset maintains or increases in value in times of economic stress. It can be a government bond, a currency like the US dollar, a commodity like gold, or even a blue-chip stock. Crypto, including Bitcoin, “has never been a ‘safe haven play’ in my opinion,” Buvaneshwaran Venugopal, assistant professor in the department of finance at the University of Central Florida, told Cointelegraph. But things aren’t always as clear as they first appear, especially when it comes to cryptocurrencies.