James' World 2

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A start-up’s plan to run drug experiments and even develop pharmaceuticals in orbit is taking shape. If it works, it could mark a step toward developing new medicines and, ultimately, a burgeoning space-based manufacturing industry.

The start-up in question is Varda Space Industries. This week, Varda announced a partnership with United Therapeutics, a biotech company that is known for its treatments targeting rare respiratory diseases and for organ transplants.

For the past few years, the Los Angeles County–based Varda has been sending capsules into space to develop its technology for performing automated experiments that it says can only be done in microgravity. These include the manipulation of certain kinds of small molecules—the backbone of many different types of medicines, from antibiotics to corticosteroids. “Surprisingly, it’s very economical for things like small molecules, where you’re able to create novel crystal seeds in space, and then bring them back down to Earth,” says Michael Reilly, Varda’s chief strategy officer.

United Therapeutics will primarily test its small molecule drugs with Varda’s in-orbit technologies, Reilly says. But he believes that applications will expand beyond United Therapeutics’ drugs to a range of biotechnologies, such as monoclonal antibodies, which, he believes, could eventually transform from primarily intravenously administered treatments to subcutaneous shots.

Varda’s goal is to provide an in-orbit environment to develop crystals for drugs under conditions that can never be achieved on Earth. “In space, you can get bigger crystals, more perfect crystals, and they can be more uniform,” says Anne Wilson, a Butler University chemist, who has designed experiments for the International Space Station (ISS) and collaborated with Redwire Space, a space infrastructure company. Crystals with unique physical structures can also be spawned in orbit, she says. Because of such advantages, one could fashion crystals with particularly valuable properties—for example, to make a drug become more soluble and require fewer doses, thereby reducing costs, Wilson says.

The potential is there, but it is currently a risky business, says Gerard Capellades, a chemical engineer at Rowan University, who has also worked with Redwire. For one, there’s the challenge of scale, he says: researchers will have to try to use the crystals grown in space as seeds that they can multiply on the ground or will need to focus on growing single, high-value crystals for applications outside the pharmaceutical sector. It’s also exceedingly difficult to control the experimental environment in such a way that guarantees the precise crystal structure needed in a timely and cost-efficient manner. Capellades describes the approach as a game of chance: “For the same environment, sometimes it can take minutes to form a crystal, and sometimes it can take weeks or longer,” he says. But he thinks that costs will eventually drop and that it’s worth pursuing.

Varda’s orbital lab, nicknamed “Winnebago,” consists of a 300-kilogram (about 660-pound) satellite bus. After being deposited in orbit by a launch vehicle, Winnebago uses its own propulsion to maneuver into the right attitude. The satellite houses the capsule in which the experiments are done. Once the work is complete, the capsule reenters the atmosphere at some 18,000 miles per hour, parachuting down with a bump in the Australian outback. (An early prototype’s return to Earth, with planned landing zone in a desert in Utah, was delayed in 2024 because the company was initially denied a reentry license by the Federal Aviation Administration.)

In addition to drug experiments, Varda also brings various defense experiment payloads on its spaceflights for the Pentagon to help defray the cost, Reilly says. While launch costs per pound of cargo have dropped over the past decade, thanks especially to SpaceX’s reusable rockets, they’re still not cheap. So Varda and other space companies keep looking for new customers.

Still, the drug industry may be one of the most enthusiastic about making the space economy work for it. “First, it’s a giant market,” says Matthew Weinzierl, a Harvard Business School researcher, who studies the private space sector. “It’s also because the mass of some of the key ingredients in pharmaceuticals is relatively small.” For years, academic and commercial researchers have sent experiments to both the ISS and China’s space station, Tiangong. But according to Reilly, Varda and SpaceX are currently the only companies capable of launching experiments into orbit that don’t need to be operated by astronauts.

New opportunities could also emerge in the coming commercial space station era, planned for the 2030s, when new orbital outposts launch to replace the aging ISS. For example, the companies Space Tango and Voyager Technologies (formerly Nanoracks) have already begun providing plug-and-play research support services in space, and Voyager Technologies is working on a commercial station concept, called Starlab. That proposal and others have the pharma industry at their center, Weinzierl says. Meanwhile, Varda is planning for more partnerships and a faster launch cadence, eventually moving from a launch per quarter to every other month.

Weinzierl hopes that Varda’s partnership with United Therapeutics turns into a successful proof of concept that could then be replicated. Short of that result, it could set off a domino effect, he argues, with more pharma space company alliances on the horizon. “It would be fantastic if this partnership yielded a couple or even one blockbuster product or drug that really started opening up profitable business models for pharma in space at scale,” he says.

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Hmmmm … A billion Dollars could feed billions of starving children!

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A GOP bill seeking $1 billion for the Secret Service to help finance President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom is in jeopardy as it faces pushback from a top Senate official.

The Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, said Saturday that the budget bill, which aims to fund ICE and Border Patrol alongside $1 billion to help fund the ballroom, needs to be rewritten to account for jurisdictional issues.

“A project as complex and large in scale as Trump’s proposed ballroom necessarily involves the coordination of many government agencies which span the jurisdiction of many Senate committees,” MacDonough told Senate offices Saturday. “As drafted, the provision inappropriately funds activities outside the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee.”

The parliamentarian wrote that the bill would be subject to a 60-vote threshold to pass, meaning it can’t move forward with a simple majority, unlike similar bills advanced using budget reconciliation.

Budget reconciliation is a parliamentary tool used to get around the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster threshold, but it comes with restrictions on what provisions can be included.

The development is a blow to the Republican bill, but it is not the end of efforts to include ballroom funding. Senate Republicans had already been redrafting the provision’s language before Saturday’s ruling based on feedback from Senate officials, a GOP leadership aide told NBC News.

A spokesperson for Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans also told NBC News that “conversations and revisions are continuing, as they have been for days.”

It’s not clear if Republicans can rewrite the provision in a way that would fully resolve the parliamentarian’s issues. The budget resolution detailing what can be included in the bill only allows language to originate from the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

If Senate officials again find the ballroom project falls under the jurisdiction of a committee other than those two, Republicans may be forced to leave that funding out of the bill, as they likley won’t find the 60 votes needed to overrule the parliamentarian.

Senate Budget Committee Ranking Member Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., said in a statement Saturday that “the American people shouldn’t spend a single dime on Trump’s gold-plated ballroom boondoggle.”

“While we expect Republicans to change this bill to appease Trump, Democrats are prepared to challenge any change to this bill,” Merkley said. “We cannot let Republicans waste our national treasure on a mission of chaos and corruption while turning a blind eye to the needs of the American people.”

Ryan Wrasse, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader John Thune, downplayed the setback for the GOP bill Saturday.

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The parliamentarian wrote that the bill would be subject to a 60-vote threshold to pass, meaning it can’t move forward with a simple majority as similar bills advanced using budget reconciliation. Alex Brandon / AP

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The lack of concrete agreements with Beijing shows the risks of President Trump’s personality-driven foreign policy, which rests on the belief that he can defend U.S. interests through charm and force of will.

There was a vague agreement that China would purchase Boeing jets and more American soybeans. There was discussion about Iran and opening the Strait of Hormuz, and a nod to other issues, like cracking down on chemicals used to make fentanyl.

But President Trump departed Beijing on Friday with almost nothing concrete to show for his two-day summit with President Xi Jinping of China. After months of buildup and a delay necessitated by Mr. Trump’s difficulty in extricating the United States from the war with Iran, the summit ended with no major public progress on the Middle East, trade, Taiwan, nuclear proliferation, artificial intelligence or any of the other myriad issues that are sources of friction between the world’s two superpowers.

Instead, Mr. Trump seemed intent on a different kind of diplomacy, forging a personal bond with a Chinese leader who appeared far more focused on advancing his own nation’s strategic agenda.

Mr. Trump toasted Mr. Xi as “my friend” at their banquet in Beijing on Thursday and said he had “become really a friend” when they sat down before the cameras on Friday.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, asked at a briefing during the summit whether Mr. Xi considered Mr. Trump a friend, responded with boilerplate: “the two sides exchanged views on major issues.”

Mr. Trump has hailed the summit in Beijing as a major success, highlighting the personal bond he says he has built with China’s longtime leader. But the feeling is not necessarily mutual, as evidenced by Mr. Xi’s more measured tone and the lack of clarity about any major agreements.

Orville Schell, vice president of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York, called the summit “quite insubstantial and aspirational.”

“We have Trump dreaming out loud,” he said.

The mismatch shows the risks in Mr. Trump’s personality-driven foreign policy, his bet that he can solve the world’s problems and defend American interests by his charm and force of will. In Mr. Xi, the U.S. president faced a counterpart this week well versed in Mr. Trump’s desire for praise and pomp, and with an apparent strategy for how to exploit it.

The result, analysts said, was a summit that illustrated the growing confidence of China on the world stage alongside a strategically muddled U.S. foreign policy under Mr. Trump.

The summit might yet come to be seen as the start of a shift toward a more stable relationship between the United States and China. But few of even the limited accomplishments that Mr. Trump spoke about were confirmed by China, while Mr. Xi set the tone with an assertive posture over Taiwan.

Experts say there is no question that personal chemistry between leaders is crucial, especially when authoritarian, centralized countries like China are involved.

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President Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, at the state banquet in Beijing on Thursday. Credit…Kenny Holston/The New York Times

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Since the first cases of hantavirus on the MV Hondius cruise ship were reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) on May 2, misinformation has rapidly flooded the Internet.

Much of it is familiar, echoing the conspiracies of the COVID pandemic, such as false claims about the drug ivermectin being known to effectively treat the infection and vaccines causing the outbreak. Hantavirus-related misinformation is “operating not like isolated rumors but more like a standing online ecosystem,” says Katrine Wallace, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois Chicago. This kind of thinking is “ready to plug and play and rapidly attach itself to any kind of emerging health threat within hours,” she says.

But not all faulty information online is being spread in bad faith. Though public health officials have said the hantavirus outbreak poses a low risk to the public, fear is its own kind of contagion. “We’re still recovering from the collective trauma of going through COVID-19. People are still carrying that residual fear, exhaustion, and distrust,” says Monica Wang, a public health researcher at Boston University, who specializes in health misinformation.

In an environment where misinformation and fear are amplified by social media algorithms, it is hard to know what to listen to and what to tune out. The key strategy for staying informed is to focus on what we know and not fill in uncertainties with worst-case scenarios. The goal is “not to dismiss concern but to calibrate concern appropriately based on evidence,” Wang says.

Recalibrating Risk

The Andes type of hantavirus at the center of this outbreak isn’t new to scientists, but outbreaks like this one are scarce. The novelty of a rare disease outbreak can result in disproportionate media attention, Wang says. And understandably, “people are responding to this uncertainty and this unfamiliarity with the familiarity of what happens when we do have a pandemic,” she says.

Many of the lessons we learned from the COVID pandemic can, perhaps surprisingly, lead us astray if we try to apply them to the current hantavirus outbreak. The two situations are very different. First, this strain of hantavirus has been previously studied by epidemiologists; SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, was entirely new to science. Second, Andes hantavirus is harder to spread from person to person and usually requires close contact to do so, although airborne spread can’t be ruled out. Third, the hantavirus outbreak is considered contained, unlike the early spread of COVID; the people most at risk of hantavirus are quarantining and being monitored. Fourth, epidemiologists suspect that hantavirus is most contagious when an infected person is showing symptoms, whereas SARS-CoV-2 can readily be transmitted by seemingly healthy people.

“It’s very hard [for people] to grasp the science of a new disease,” Wallace says. This helps to explain why COVID-era conspiracies and distrust in medical authorities have made a forceful comeback despite the differences between SARS-CoV-2 and hantavirus. When something about the current outbreak doesn’t seem to make sense, it’s easy to fall back on preexisting narratives to explain the discrepancy, such as the belief that authorities are withholding key information or that ivermectin is a cure-all. (There is no evidence that ivermectin, an antiparasitic medication, can treat hantavirus.) These false theories become especially powerful when they are amplified by people with large platforms, such as former congressional representative of Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and popular health influencers.

Threat Bias

The trauma of COVID can also highjack our reasoning by priming us to pay special attention to unfamiliar viral outbreaks and treat them as potentially devastating threats. “Humans aren’t wired for happiness. They’re wired for survival,” Wang says. If there is a potential threat in our environment, we will try to find out as much information as we can. “We pay attention when something triggers fear, surprise, or disgust,” she says, “because we’re constantly seeking [to know] ‘Is my physical safety, or my social or emotional safety, under threat?’”

Psychologists call this phenomenon negativity bias or, more specifically, threat bias. And it means that social media posts that stoke fear and uncertainty about a virus will almost always receive more attention than those that are more measured or even reassuring. Although most social media apps try to remove particularly harmful misinformation, algorithms use attention to determine what content to spread. “These social media platforms, they reward engagement, not facts,” Wallace says: if you’re seeing a video on your feed, it is likely because it is engaging, not necessarily because it’s accurate.

Red Flags

According to a Pew Research Center survey released last week, 40 percent of adults in the U.S. get health and wellness information from social media and podcasts. Some of this is inevitable: if you spend time on algorithmic social media feeds, posts about health will eventually find you. That’s especially true now that the hantavirus outbreak is dominating the news cycle.

So how can you tell who to listen to? Wallace advises being suspicious of posts that project absolute certainty or confidence. “People who speak in certainties” likely won’t be trustworthy sources, she says; responsible doctors and scientists will be clear about what we don’t know.

“People that spread misinformation can do it for many different reasons,” Wallace says. Sometimes they do so because they stand to make money by selling a product via a link in their profile’s bio or by monetizing your attention; other times, they’re just seeking clout. Right now, she advises being suspicious of people telling you to panic.

Wallace is particularly troubled by how quickly hantavirus was incorporated into the COVID-era health conspiracies and the distrust in public health authorities that still thrive in certain online ecosystems. For this disease outbreak and for future ones, “because of the way social media works,” she says, “[misinformation will] spread faster than the actual evidence-based information can reach people.”

“I worry that this represents sort of a pattern of conspiratorial framing that people are now just applying to whatever health threat comes up,” Wallace says.

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Keeping your vision in good shape is just as important as taking care of your body. There are many things you can do to protect your eyes as you age that don’t require too much effort, but can make a big difference. For example, you can wear sunglasses when you step outside to keep your eyes safe from UV rays. Making these small changes can prevent certain eye conditions that often accompany aging. Below are some of the habits you can add to your daily routine to keep your eyes healthy.

1. Wear sunglasses outside

Exposing your eyes to ultraviolet rays may cause damage over time. According to the American Academy of Ophthalmology, wearing sunglasses can block harmful UV light, lowering your risk of eye diseases like cataracts, sunburn, eye cancer, and growths around the eye. Polarized glasses with smoke or gray lenses may offer the best protection against the sun’s rays and reduce glare.

2. Use the 20-20-20 screen break rule

Prolonged screen time can cause dry eyes, pain in the neck and shoulders, blurred vision, headaches and digital eye strain, or computer vision syndrome. The American Optometric Association recommends using the 20-20-20 rule to prevent computer vision syndrome. Every 20 minutes, look at something at least 20 feet away for 20 seconds.

3. Take a break from books, too

Screen time isn’t the only way to strain your eyes. You probably hold a book up close for long periods when you read it. Both activities can lead to nearsightedness, or myopia, which means faraway objects are blurry, while up-close objects are clear. Just like you should use the 20-20-20 rule to take screen breaks, you should also use this rule for book breaks. If you find yourself engrossed in what you’re reading or doing on the computer, set an alarm so you don’t miss your breaks.

4. Get your body moving with regular exercise

Regular exercise can provide eye health benefits, such as promoting healthy blood vessels and lowering your risk of developing glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy, the American Academy of Ophthalmology reports. The CDC recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity every week, plus two days of strength training for your muscles. You can also practice eye exercises to reduce tension and eye strain while sitting at your desk.

5. Enjoy the outdoors

Children and adults need to get outside often, even if they get their recommended exercise indoors. Research shows that children who spend time outdoors have a lower risk of developing nearsightedness in adolescence and as adults. Playing with your kids at the local playground, walking through the woods, or even playing in the backyard can help the whole family stay healthy and active. Be sure to use your sunglasses.

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Boosting your eye health involves more than simply protecting them from the sun. Anastassiya Bezhekeneva/Getty Images

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The Supreme Court does not ordinarily review rulings by state supreme courts interpreting state constitutions.

The fight over the Virginia map stems from a redistricting push that began last summer when President Trump pressured Republican-led states to redraw their district maps ahead of the midterms in hopes of maintaining the party’s razor-thin majority in the House.

First, Texas officials redrew their lines to give Republicans an advantage. Then, California responded by crafting a new map to help Democrats. Similar efforts have followed in other states throughout the country.

In the fall, Virginia lawmakers voted to amend their state constitution to clear the way for Democrats to redraw the map, a process that required two votes of the state’s General Assembly, with an election in between.

The timing of that fall vote is crucial for understanding what followed. Lawmakers authorized the amendment just days before the fall’s legislative election, while early voting was already underway. More than a million voters had already cast their ballots.

After another vote of the assembly, Virginians approved the map in a statewide referendum in April. The move was widely seen as a victory for the party that put it on equal footing with Republican redistricting efforts nationwide, or even might give Democrats a narrow advantage.

But Republicans swiftly challenged the new map, arguing that Democrats had violated the procedural guidelines required to pass the redistricting amendment by beginning the process once an election was underway.

Democrats countered that they had voted in time, since they acted before Election Day. They also argued that the state Supreme Court should not undercut the will of the voters who took part in the spring referendum.

On May 8, the Virginia Supreme Court sided with the Republicans, deciding 4 to 3 that the Democratic lawmakers had violated the state’s constitution by taking up the matter after early voting was underway.

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The Supreme Court’s ruling blocking the map wipes out four newly drawn Democratic-leaning House districts in Virginia. Credit…Eric Lee for The New York Times

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A century before social-media bans and advice to disable device notifications, the inventor and science-fiction writer Hugo Gernsback proposed a more extreme way to avoid distraction: an isolating wooden helmet. Outside influences, he said, were “the greatest difficulty that the human mind has to contend with.” Gernsback’s isolator device — part diving suit, part monastic cell — did help him to work, he said, but it came with a risk of suffocation. He later installed an air supply.

Concerns that sustained thought is under assault have become even more acute in the digital era. Smartphones buzz, Internet tabs multiply, and television episodes carry regular reminders to help people keep track of the plot. Surveys suggest that we feel less able to concentrate, teachers report distracted students, and headlines declare that our attention spans are shrinking.

Research across psychology and neuroscience, however, has built up a more nuanced picture of what is happening to our attention spans. The results suggest that people do flit from one task to another more frequently than they did in previous decades, and that this switching is often detrimental to performance. But there is little evidence that the brain’s fundamental ability to concentrate has been impaired. This suggests that if we can shut down the distractions of our environment, it is possible to recover focus.

“I think there’s a huge disconnect between what we feel like is happening and what is actually happening,” says Monica Rosenberg, a psychologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois.

The attention-span confusion

“There is a whole flurry of people reporting that they feel like they can’t pay attention,” says Nilli Lavie, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London. “They say they are constantly distracted, their attention jumps from one thing to another, and they can’t concentrate.”

In a 2021 survey of more than 2,000 UK adults, almost half said they felt their attention span was shorter than it used to be. And two-thirds thought that the attention span of young people has declined. Teachers and schools around the world have responded to this perception with modular lessons that break topics into digestible pieces. Some students now study literary extracts rather than full novels. When the novelist Elif Shafak questioned why TED talks were becoming shorter, she said last year she was told that it was because “the world’s average attention span has shrunk.”

The idea of an average attention span carries intuitive appeal. But the way it’s discussed can tangle distinct concepts. Researchers distinguish between people’s capacity to pay attention, that is, their underlying ability to concentrate on a particular task, and their real-world behaviour, or what people actually focus on from moment to moment.

What’s more, the capacity to pay attention is the result of several processes in the brain. These include sustained attention, the ability to stay engaged with a task over time; selective attention, the ability to prioritize some information and ignore the rest; and executive control, the ability to steer attention in line with a goal rather than whatever happens to be more tempting.

Attention in the laboratory

Capacity is measured under controlled laboratory conditions that test performance on a task — often a tedious one — over time. To test sustained attention, volunteers might monitor a screen showing streams of letters and shapes and identify specific changes. The ‘d2’ task, for instance, displays rows of letters, such as d and p, sometimes with dashes drawn above or below them, and asks people to mark the letter d only if it has two lines underneath.

Many lab studies have shown how performance on such tasks declines in about ten minutes, although the pattern of decline is not smooth: even apparently strong attention naturally fluctuates between bursts of good performance, lapses, and recovery.

Further tests demonstrate how providing a distracting environment, such as playing sounds of babies crying and dogs barking, worsens people’s performance on cognitive tasks. This provides a basis for understanding distractions in the real world. Analyses have demonstrated that, for instance, traffic accidents are more likely to occur if drivers are talking on their phones.

The lab studies haven’t shown evidence that — when free of distractions — people’s underlying capacity to pay attention has changed. But there are differences in how people perform. Those who say they frequently juggle several streams of media at once tend to perform worse on tests of selective attention, for example, showing greater difficulty filtering out irrelevant information. They also show differences in tests related to working memory and executive control.

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Karol Banach

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You’ve worked hard and spent decades building something significant, and, naturally, you want it to have a lasting impact for your family.

Earning, saving, and investing have been your focus over the years, and you’ve probably also taken most or all of the typical estate planning steps.

Last year at Catalyst Advisory, we surveyed 1,000 American adults and found that 90% hope to have something to leave behind for future generations. It’s clear that legacy matters to most of us.

Unfortunately, 70% of wealthy families lose that wealth by the second generation, and 90% of it by the third. Those who successfully maintain family wealth are in the minority.

The myth: ‘A good estate plan is enough.’

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As a wealth transfer adviser, my work is all about helping families protect and preserve their wealth. And before I started my firm, I spent seven years in a family office role, working with ultra-wealthy families.

If you have a will, life insurance, beneficiary designations, and an asset inventory, and followed other typical estate planning advice, you might feel like you’re all set. But families who successfully preserve their wealth do a few specific things most people never consider.

Three things families that preserve their wealth do differently

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While these lessons were learned by observing ultra-wealthy families, you don’t need a massive fortune to apply these principles. Families with much more modest wealth will also benefit by taking these proactive steps.

1. They write a family constitution

A family constitution is a living document that defines the family’s shared values, the purpose of the wealth, and guidelines for how future generations should steward that wealth. It is not a legal document and doesn’t replace a will or trust.

There’s nothing legally binding about a family constitution, and yet it’s incredibly effective for alignment. Without a shared understanding of why the wealth exists, heirs often default to spending it or using it in ways the previous generation wouldn’t have wanted.

Family constitutions usually include a family mission statement, clear expectations about work ethic, guidelines for decision-making and an overview of succession principles.

Since it’s an unofficial document, the family constitution can include whatever is important to you, such as philanthropy and guiding principles for giving.

Creating the family constitution is the first step, but it’s not a document that you create once and file away for your heirs to read after you’re gone. For it to be effective, the family constitution should be a living document that’s reviewed, discussed, and updated if necessary.

Get your kids or heirs involved as early as possible to increase buy-in. Many families have occasional meetings to discuss their values and go over the details covered in the family constitution. The more the next generation is involved in the process, the more effective it will be

2. They play defense before offense

When it comes to retirement planning and building a portfolio, investing and growth are usually the focus. High returns are the goal.

But families who successfully preserve their wealth typically spend more time and energy on tax strategy and protecting their wealth than selecting the right investments. It’s a completely different mindset.

In estate planning, what you pass on is far more important than what you accumulate. Taxes at death, capital gains on inherited assets, and estate settlement costs can quickly gut a family’s wealth before the heirs ever see it.

Here are a few strategies that benefit many families.

Irrevocable trusts. When structured properly, irrevocable trusts remove assets from your taxable estate, meaning your heirs will receive more. The trade-off is that you give up some control.

They’re not right for everyone, but irrevocable trusts can be effective if you hold illiquid assets or if your portfolio will grow quickly (so the future growth occurs outside of the estate).

Life insurance as a wealth transfer tool. Life insurance can offer much more than just a death benefit. A permanent life policy held in an irrevocable life insurance trust (ILIT) can give your heirs a tax-free lump sum outside of your estate. It provides excellent liquidity so your heirs can pay taxes without selling assets (very important if you own a business or a real estate portfolio).

Harvest tax advantages while you’re alive. Annual gifting within exclusion limits, Roth conversions during lower-income years and charitable remainder trusts can significantly reduce your taxable estate over time.

These efforts typically compound, so the more attention you give them now, the more money your heirs will have later.

3. They consolidate rather than divide

Estate planning typically involves splitting everything evenly among the heirs, so they can do with their inheritance as they please. While that seems fair, it actually may not be in their best interest.

Dividing assets, especially illiquid ones like real estate and businesses, often forces a sale. Fire sales usually result in family conflict and erosion of the estate.

Families who successfully preserve generational wealth often use structures designed to keep the capital in one place. This may involve a family LLC, a trust, or shared governance of family assets. Heirs can benefit equally from a pool of assets without dividing and splitting everything apart, which often results in lost value.

The legacy isn’t the money

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Families who preserve generational wealth aren’t successful because they have more to begin with. They maintain their wealth because of their intentional approach. You don’t need tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to benefit from the same mindset and actions.

Family constitutions, a defensive-oriented mindset, and consolidated structures aren’t just for the ultra-wealthy. You may have never considered these strategies, but they could make a difference that lasts for generations.

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(Image credit: Getty Images)

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President Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, emphasized stability on Friday as they concluded a high-stakes summit in Beijing, albeit without announcing any clear resolutions on trade, Taiwan, the war in Iran or other major points of contention.

Sitting beside Mr. Xi during a meeting at Zhongnanhai, the walled headquarters for China’s ruling Communist Party, Mr. Trump said that the Chinese leader had “become really a friend” and that they felt similarly about the war.

When asked whether China had agreed to buy Boeing jets, a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman said at the ministry’s daily briefing on Friday only that China-U.S. economic ties were mutually beneficial.

On agriculture, however, he said that China is ready to work on important economic understandings reached by Xi and Trump.

Trump, greeted by flag-waving students at the airport, wasted no time as he climbed the stairs of Air Force One, turned for a quick wave, and hopped aboard. Staff scrambled aboard, doors closed, and at 2:41 pm Beijing time, we rolled down the runway. Next stop: Alaska, for refueling.

When Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, joined the group of American business leaders traveling with President Trump to Beijing at the last minute this week, many took it as a sign that progress was in store for the company’s long-stalled sales in China.

But as the summit between Mr. Trump and Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, wrapped up on Friday, the fate of Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips in China was no clearer than it had been before.

Xi again linked Trump’s Make America Great Again movement to his signature domestic vision, which he calls the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” during talks between the two leaders at Zhongnanhai. “Through strengthened cooperation, both China and the United States can promote their respective development and revitalization,” Xi said.

President Trump said on Thursday that China had agreed to order 200 Boeing jets, potentially lifting the fortunes of the American jet manufacturer in one of the world’s largest aviation markets.

In an interview with Fox News, Mr. Trump hailed what he termed as successes from the first day of meetings with Xi Jinping, China’s top leader. He said Mr. Xi told him that an order would be placed for the American planes.

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Xi and Trump on Friday

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Hmmmm … It is time to launch Space Jnk LLC.  Watch Space Junk (2023)

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Almost half the stuff in orbit around Earth can be classified as space junk, and the problem is only going to get worse as launches and orbital infrastructure increase.

Using data from the U.S. Space Force’s Space-Track.org, engineering component supply company Accu determined there are currently 33,269 trackable objects in orbit. Of those, 17,682 are satellites. The rest are some form of junk, ranging from expended rocket bodies to debris to objects that could not be identified.

“This means that nearly 47 percent of tracked objects are space junk,” the company wrote in a new report. “However, with many satellites no longer operational, it means the true proportion of inactive or uncontrollable objects is even higher.”

Space junk has been accumulating since the first satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched in 1957. Yet the problem has grown sharply over the past decade as the cost of launches has dropped and the cadence of space flights has increased. The amount of trackable objects in orbit rose by around 10,000 between 2020 and 2025 alone.

The scale of the issue may be grossly underestimated. Accu notes that there may be millions of objects that are too tiny to track, such as paint flecks and other debris that came loose from rockets and other spacecraft. That poses a major risk: Most objects in orbit are traveling at upward of 17,000 miles per hour—at that speed, even the tiniest mote could inflict significant damage on orbiting infrastructure. In 2024, astronauts onboard the International Space Station had to take shelter after a decommissioned Russian satellite broke into numerous fragments. That incident prompted the launch of a U.S. governmental program aimed at finding and monitoring low-Earth orbit’s tiniest pieces of garbage. And in 2025, several Chinese taikonauts became stranded on the Tiangong space station after a suspected piece of space junk cracked the window of their return capsule.

While there’s a chance an orbiting piece of junk could hurt or kill an astronaut, Accu’s analysis suggests that the greatest danger is to satellites, with seven tracked pieces of junk for every 10 satellites.

Despite being a problem that’s literally around the globe, the causes are not global. The report estimates that China is responsible for 65 percent of the debris in orbit, while the U.S. and the Commonwealth of Independent States—comprised of Russia and eight smaller countries—account for an estimated 40 percent and 23 percent, respectively.

Space agencies, such as NASA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, the U.K. Space Agency, and the European Space Agency, are working on ways to clean up lower-Earth orbit. Several private companies have also begun marketing their services as space garbage collectors. But until large amounts of junk are removed, Accu has called on spacecraft designers to take the threat more seriously.

“For the engineers shaping the spacecraft of tomorrow, they must keep space debris in mind from the start,” the report’s authors write. “Every component, from its precision, durability, and material, has to be chosen carefully to survive potential impacts. Space debris is a key challenge of the modern space age, but how it is tackled will drive innovation and define the future of space exploration.”

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World Map Courtesy of NASA/Getty Images

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