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Just 48 short years ago, movie director George Lucas used the phrase A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away as the opening to the first Star Wars movie, later labeled Episode IV: A New Hope. But at least four important aspects of the Star Wars saga are much closerboth in time and spacethan Lucas was letting on. One, the ability to add blue food coloring to milk, was possible even at the time the first film came out. But in 2024, Star Wars-themed blue milk became periodically available in grocery stores. And we, an environmental health engineer and a civil engineer, know there are at least three more elements of these ancient, distant Lucas stories that might seem like science fiction but are, in fact, science reality. Moisture farming In that first movie, Episode IV, Luke Skywalkers Uncle Owen was a farmer on the planet of Tatooine. He farmed water from air in the middle of a desert. It might sound impossible, but its exactly what experts discussed at the second International Atmospheric Water Harvesting Summit hosted by Arizona State University in March 2025. Each day, a human needs to consume about the equivalent of 0.8 gallons of water (3 liters). With more than 8 billion people living on the planet, that means engineers need to produce nearly 2.6 trillion gallons (10 trillion liters) of clean drinking water every year. Taken globally, rainfall would be enough, but its distributed very unevenlyincluding landing in the oceans, where it immediately becomes too salty to drink safely. Deserts, which cover about one-fifth of the Earths land area, are home to about 1 billion people. Researchers at places such as Berkeley have developed solar-powered systems that can produce clean drinking water from thin air. In general, they use a material that traps water molecules from the air within its structure and then use sunlight to condense that water out of the material and into drinkable liquid. But there is still a ways to go before they are ready for commercial distribution and available to help large numbers of people. Space debris When the second Death Star was destroyed in Return of the Jedi, it made a huge mess, as you would expect when blowing to smithereens an object at least 87 miles across (140 kilometers). But the movies mythology helpfully explains that a hyperspace wormhole briefly opened, scattering much of the falling debris across the galaxy. As best as anyone can tell, a hyperspace wormhole has never appeared near Earth. And even if such a thing existed or happened, humans might not have the technology to chuck all our trash in there anyway. So were left with a whole lot of stuff all around us, including in space. According to the website Orbiting Now, in late April 2025 there were just over 12,000 active satellites orbiting the planet. All in all, the United States and other space-faring nations are trying to keep track of nearly 50,000 objects orbiting Earth. And there are millions of fragments of space debris too small to be observed or tracked. Just as on Earths roads, space vehicles crash into each other if traffic gets too congested. But unlike the debris that falls to the road after an Earth crash, all the bits and pieces that break off in a space crash fly away at speeds of several thousand miles per hour (10,000 to 30,000 kph) and can then hit other satellites or spacecraft that cross their paths. This accumulation of space debris is creating an increasing problem. With more satellites and spacecraft heading to orbit, and more stuff up there moving around that might hit them, space travel is becoming more like flying the Millennium Falcon through an asteroid field every day. Engineers at NASA, the European Space Agency, and other space programs are exploring a variety of technologiesincluding a net, a harpoon, and a laserto remove the more dangerous pieces of space junk and clean up the space environment. The Force itself To most Earth audiences, the Force was a mysterious energy field created by life that binds the galaxy together. That is until 1999, when Episode I: The Phantom Menace revealed that the Force came from midi-chlorians, a microscopic, sentient life form that lives within every living cell. To biologists, midi-chlorians sound suspiciously similar to mtochondria, the powerhouse of our cells. The current working hypothesis is that mitochondria emerged from bacteria that lived within cells of other living things. And mitochondria can communicate with other life forms, including bacteria. There are many different kinds of mitochondria, and medical professionals are learning how to transplant mitochondria from one cell to another just like they transplant organs from one persons body to another. Maybe one day a transplant procedure could help people find the light side of the Force and turn away from the dark side. May the Fourthand the Forcebe with you. Daniel B. Oerther is a professor of environmental health engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology. William Schonberg is a professor of civil engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
Sometimes, you need to shake things up in your career. Maybe the job isnt as fulfilling anymore. Maybe changing circumstances are pushing you toward a new path. Either way, figuring out what to do next can be a challenge. Increasingly, artificial intelligence is helping people explore their next stepseven when theyre unsure themselves. Chatbots like ChatGPT can offer some guidance, provided you know how to phrase your questions. But several companies have developed specialized tools that focus specifically on this issue. Google is leading the pack with its Career Dreamer. Described as “a playful way to explore career possibilities with AI,” its a tool that anyone can use. To get started with Career Dreamer, youll develop a “career identity statement,” which outlines your skills and experiences. After sharing your current job, the AI will ask follow-up questions about what that role involved. You can also add details about your educational background and any careers, industries, or fields that interest you. Career Dreamer then suggests potential career paths based on your input. (For example, among its alternate career suggestions for me were communications/public relations specialist, communications professor, and market research analystalong with several jobs in the reporting field.) Hovering your mouse over each suggested field provides information about the type of degree typically required, the experience you’ll generally need, a description of the job, andif you click throughthe average salary. Find something that looks intriguing? You can click through to a list of local job opportunities or jump over to the Gemini AI tool to craft a résumé or cover letter. LinkedIn, meanwhile, offers the Next Role Explorer for users whose companies subscribe to its Learning Hub. That tool showcases potential opportunities within the company, suggests skills employees should develop, and shows how many openings exist in each role. It also displays the percentage of people who have successfully transitioned from the employees current role to the new one. AI, for that service, acts as a career coach, offering recommended courses and career paths. It also helps employees stay on track as they work toward acquiring the skills needed for a new role. At Salesforce, the company rolled out Career Connect last Septemberan internal talent marketplace that uses AI to help employees create personalized career paths tailored to their skills and aspirations. The tool is embedded in Salesforces Slack workflow. Employees can view roles theyre currently qualified for, as well as positions where their skills are easily transferable. If a job catches their interest, they can apply directly within Slack. Early results, Salesforce says, have been extremely positive: Ninety-one percent of the roles that were filled went to participants in the Career Connect pilot program who discovered those opportunities through the tool. During the three-month trial, 28% of participants applied for jobs via the platform. Given the ongoing fears that AI will take peoples jobsfreelance positions have already seen a 21% drop in demandits somewhat reassuring to see it also being used to help people find them.
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E-Commerce
Ziplines cofounder and CEO Keller Cliffton charts the companys recent expansion from transporting blood for lifesaving transfusions in Rwanda to retail deliveries across eight countriesincluding high-profile partnerships with the likes of Walmart, Chipotle, Panera, and the Mayo Clinic. Ziplines do-good health efforts and commercial deliveries are all part of Cliffton’s vision for a radical, new transportation network that meets consumers desire for accessibility and speed. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. I’ve been watching Zipline’s evolution over the years with fascination. You first popped up on my radar for using drones to deliver medicines in hard-to-reach places in Africa, and then I saw a similarly named company doing drone delivery for restaurants and retailers that I thought, like, is this the same place? And then of course it is. You recently announced an expanded partnership with Walmart to provide deliveries in Texas, in the Dallas area. How different is it to do business with a Walmart versus, say, a hospital in Rwanda? When we started Zipline, our backgrounds were in automation and robotics, and it seemed to us like it should be possible to build an automated logistics system for Earth. We were seeing all of these logistics failures. I mean, first of all, logistics really only serves the golden billion people on Earth. If you’re in the 7 billion people who aren’t in the golden billion, your access either sucks or is nonexistent. And as a result of that, about five and a half million kids lose their lives every year due to lack of access to basic medical products. So, we felt that it really should be possible to use robotics and autonomy to solve logistics in an entirely new way that would save lives, save time, save money. You’re right that we actually spent the first eight years of the company’s history operating exclusively in Africa. In 2016, when we launched commercially, we were 20 people. Nobody believed that this was going to work. Everybody thought it was a stupid idea. And investors assured us that there was no chance we were going to get regulatory approval to do what we wanted to do, which was to fly autonomously and quickly, and deliver things over large distances. It was obvious to us that we needed to find a use case that was so incredibly important that even a conservative regulator would sort of roll out the red carpet and work with us as a partnership to make it happen. And that first partner was the Ministry of Health in Rwanda, and that’s how it all started. We started delivering blood transfusions to 21 hospitals across the country of Rwanda. And now when you think about what the Zipline is, how much is social impact? How much is business impact, environmental impact? Well, interestingly, those three things were core parts of our mission from day one. Saving lives was a big part of what we were doing for the first three, four years, but also saving governments money was a big part of what we were doing. And always we had this underlying mission of transitioning logistics to a zero emission future. It was taking products that were traveling in cars or motorcycles or trucks to a future that was fully electric and far more efficient. Today we deliver 75% of the national blood supply of Rwanda fully autonomously outside the capital city. We’ve delivered about 22 million doses of vaccines in the last 18 months. And then expanded to all medical products. Then it expanded to animal healthcare products and animal vaccines. Then it expanded to quick commerce products and delivering things to hotels and homes. Now we’re building a new national postal service on top of it. People could have the impression that, okay, you started with this high-stakes lifesaving stuff and now you’ve added sort of convenience, whatever, getting your lunch delivered. But really it’s all about funding the socially minded work. Is the retail business there to fund the socially minded work? And if I hear you right, you always wanted to go broader and that this was a more systemic effort, that the social part of it was a way to get to that. Well, I mean, we think that people deserve access to lifesaving medical products. They also deserve access to economic opportunity. I mean, these things are important. If you’re trying to start a business and you live in a rural part of a country, if you don’t have access to logistics, you can’t start your business. If you’re trying to buy products for your family, you have a right to buy the best products or the cheapest products available rather than just what might happen to be available at the store right next to you. So I think logistics plays a bigger role in our lives than we realize. Logistics should serve all people on Earth equally, and that really is the promise of bringing autonomy and robotics to bear in logistics. Bringing down logistics costs dramatically, making delivery faster but more universally available, is [a way] you can save lives. You can also save people money and time. I mean, they’re all important. It’s true that probably nothing will compare to delivering a blood transfusion to a mom with postpartum hemorrhaging, which is what we did for the first four years of the company’s history. But our customers have really led us here. Is there any difference in the commercial sphere, like with a Walmart or a Panera store? Same product, same regulatory paradigm, same operations and maintenance, same software. Yeah, it’s really, Zipline builds one product, and that’s just automated logistics. And turns out that if you can design a way of delivering things directly to people’s homes that is 10 times as fast and half the cost and zero emission, it has a lot of important use cases. The demand for instant delivery has increased dramatically. I mean, it’s now become a expectation for consumers, not just in the U.S. but internationally as well. We’re using technology that’s 100 years old to serve that demand. And so we actually think it’s not surprising that the way that we’re solving the problem today is really inefficient and bad for the environment and expensive. With a new market, you want to build new technology that can serve that market. And your drones are autonomous, so there’s no one remotely manipulating a joystick to move them around and guide them. How are they getting from, whatever, from the Panera to me and my home? So Zipline builds the largest drone delivery system on Earth. We are a robotics company that designs every part of the system, whether it is the drone or the aircraft, it’s about 60 pounds, 8-foot wingspan. We deliver 8-pound payloads. These vehicles can fly anywhere from 25 miles to 150 miles depending on what version of the system we’re talking about. Zipline builds all the software, all the regulatory software, the customer ordering app that consumers can use. We design the flight control algorithms, multivehcle deconfliction, communications architecture. The reality is, it just took a long time to build all these different parts of the stack to make the technology available, reliable, capable of operating in all kinds of weather. Zipline has now flown about 100 million commercial autonomous miles. That means that we’re the largest commercial autonomous system on Earth. To put that number into perspective, that is going from the Earth to the moon and back 200 times. Or that is the equivalent of driving every single road in the United States 24 times. So although people still in the U.S. think drone delivery might be impossible, or was promised to us by this big tech company and they didn’t deliver. The reality is actually that the technology is working, and it’s working at scale.
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E-Commerce
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