NASA futurist Michael LaPointe joins the podcast to talk about what it will take—in technology, time and treasure—to get a human out of our solar system.

The environmental agency collects vast amounts of data each day from its constellation of satellites.

NASA invents a lot of cool and cutting edge technology to make space exploration possible—tech that often ends up pretty close to home as well.

Oak Ridge National Lab’s Travis Humble discussed the state of quantum technology development and what it demands for future development.

Leaders from GSA’s 10x program join the podcast to talk about how they’re mapping paths through the Valley of Death.

Nextgov looks at the use of cooperative research and development agreements by some major industry players to highlight how the meaning of the phrase, and implementation of its associated authorities, has shifted over the years.

The future of warfare could be determined by the Defense Department’s ability—or lack thereof—to quickly adopt emerging technologies.

Agencies will soon be required to ask vendors for a software bill of materials—or SBOM—to help manage vulnerabilities like those found in the Log4J library, but much of its contents could still be open for negotiation.

The newest and next era of supercomputing is on the horizon.

Re-writing the law for agencies to procure more secure cloud services is now mandated by executive order.

Here are the latest developments regarding unidentified aerial phenomena.

A nascent team is developing platforms that are enabling new discoveries and insight sharing across the federal agency.

Federal Chief Information Officer Clare Martorana joins Critical Update to talk about the technology underpinning the President’s Management Agenda, particularly with regard to improving customer experience.

Nextgov digs into the Veterans Affairs Department’s strategic efforts to deploy future-facing technologies to modernize the care it provides. Department officials are experimenting with augmented and virtual reality—and also figuring out how tiny devices like sensors could improve the canes used by the visually impaired or help prevent falls in fac…

Time isn’t one of the things agencies facing cyberattacks usually have, but according to federal Chief Information Security Officer Chris DeRusha, that’s exactly what they need. To address the new age of cyberattacks, DeRusha previewed changes to cybersecurity reporting practices and his role working with other cyber leaders, agency CISOs and the F…

Technology is not good or evil—it all depends on how it is used. The same is true of cryptocurrencies, which are often used to purchase illicit goods and services or for questionable “investment” schemes but can also help vulnerable communities not served by—or taken advantage of by—traditional financial institutions. The latest episode of Critical…

Deepfakes have a range of compelling applications in the modern communication and entertainment realms but the techniques underpinning them can also be repurposed for nefarious uses. This form of synthetic media, which often presents people doing and saying things they did not actually do or say, rose in popularity over the last several years, incl…

The eventuality of a quantum computer won’t mean the end of information security as it’s often described. But experts say the threat it poses to encryption and security does demand urgent action from federal agencies, even as they fend off current cyberattacks. This episode dives into what policy efforts from the White House and Congress could push…

In 2017, the Defense Department started kicking around a disruptive idea: What if the department buys—not builds—an enterprise cloud? The department initiated a multibillion-dollar procurement for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud, which hit legal snag after legal snag until DOD cancelled the project in July. Though JEDI was never r…

U.S. national laboratories are about to enter the exascale era by turning on supercomputers that can perform a billion billion operations per second. But all hardware needs software, which led the Energy Department to create the Exascale Computing Project—a vast network of some of the nation’s top scientists to create programs to simulate wind farm…