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Its tough enough bringing the first major redesign of a commercial jetliner to fruitionespecially when it looks more like something out of The X-Files than a travel brochure. So, to streamline that journey, JetZerothe first commercial blended-wing body (BWB) aircraftis teaming with Delta as an eventual buyer to troubleshoot operation and design issues from the ground up. Our biggest challenge is, `How do you bring an aircraft to market as quickly as possible so that you can have the most impact for your customer? says CEO Tom OLeary, who cofounded JetZero with CTO Mark Page. We don’t want to zig-zag our way to entry into service. We want to take the cleanest, most direct shot. Because, ultimately, saving time means you’re saving money. Not to mention, the environment. The aircrafts lighter weight and superior aerodynamics aim to deliver the same speed and range as existing midbody jetliners on half the fuel, potentially saving airlines billions of dollars and bringing them closer to an industry goal of zero-carbon flight by 2050. In contrast to the conventional tube and wing design, the tailless BWB combines the wing structure and passenger area, making it look a bit like a flying manta ray. Its shape reduces drag and increases lift, so the plane can cruise at higher altitudes in thinner air on less fuel. ‘We want to think about a world in 2050’ JetZero is targeting the underserved midbody, 250-seat class of carriers, which it plans to manufacture domestically. Since its 2021 founding, the Southern California startup has raised $300 million from investors including NASA, Airbus, Alaska Air, and EasyJet, plus a $235 million award from the U.S. Air Force for a demonstrator plane in 2027. The partnership with Delta gives JetZero access to its Sustainable Skies Lab, an R&D and testing accelerator for more sustainable air travel, and Delta TechOps, which streamlines fleet maintenance management. There, experts help refine the economics, engineering, and workflow through the operations and passenger experience lens, such as airport and gating constraints, loading and unloading, cabin configuration, and interior design. [Rendering: JetZero] It’s really expensive and challenging to bring a new aircraft to market, says Delta CSO Amelia DeLuca. What we can do is, from the ground up, say, `This is what you need to be the best-in-class from a customer experience, to work for our employees, to maintain this aircraft when it flies. We look at how we would deploy it, and the specs and seat count we would need to put this into market. Adds OLeary: Its figuring out what’s going to work or not as quickly as possible. We don’t see any other way to do that other than have a deep interaction with the customers. Delta knows its products better than the manufacturers because they’re operating them days, weeks, months, years, decades; theyre the real experts on all the things we need to get the plane to a point where you fundamentally de-risk it. JetZero and Delta have been collaborating since the startups inception in 2021 but opted to publicize their partnership in the wake of Deltas March 3 Centennial and its message for greater sustainability and customer service during the next hundred years. Jet Zeros fuel-efficiency also enables greater potential range, opening Delta to more destinations. We want to think about a world in 2050 where we are flying more sustainably, more efficiently, but also opening up new markets and points of connection, says DeLuca. Engineering catnip A working commercial BWB would realize a long-held aviation dream that began decades ago but never progressed past prototypesmany involving future JetZero engineers. Page, a chief engineer with NASAs BWB program in the `90s, is considered one of the fathers of BWBs alongside Robert Liebeck, who developed the first prototype for NASA, and Blaine Rawdon, both JetZero technical advisors. Delta’s made up of so many aerospace engineers who learned about Mark Page and BWB technology when they went through school, says DeLuca. So as soon as you say that we’re talking to Jet Zeroyou know, with Mark Page with BWBthey’re like, `Oh my gosh, I’ve always wanted to make this thing fly.
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E-Commerce
Mass layoffs struck the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization (NOAA) late last week, throwing into jeopardy the core mission of the agency tasked with observing the skies and seas nationwideand a key piece of the federal disaster preparedness apparatus. In addition to hampering the day-to-day weather forecasting ability of its National Weather Service, cuts to NOAA will curtail efforts to protect endangered species, manage coastal regions, and prepare for climate change. When combined with the federal hiring freeze, recently terminated staff told Fast Company that the cuts put their organizations on a trajectory to “break.” The moves have drawn outrage from Democratic members of Congress and the general public. Thousands of people showed up to protest on Monday near the Colorado and Maryland NOAA campuses in support of the National Weather Service, which has a higher favorability rating than Taylor Swift. A rally in support of NOAA in Boulder, Colorado, on March 3, 2025. [Photo: Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post/Getty Images] Maryland congressman Chris Van Hollen called the cuts an assault on our public safety. They are our eyes and ears, and so when you close your eyes and plug your ears, people will get hurt, he said at a virtual press conference shortly after the cuts were announced. Because the cuts were tied to federal employees with probationary status, the impact was haphazard and largely without regard to their specific job functions. In Miami, multiple hurricane researchers were let go. In Alaska, a member of the 24/7 National Tsunami Warning Center lost her job. Michigans Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory can no longer staff a communications team. More than 10% of the staff of the Maryland-based Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) were fired, dealing a significant blow to the ability of the U.S. to maintain and improve its weather forecasting capabilities. Accurate and timely weather forecast models maintained by the EMC and provided by the NWS not only power virtually all weather apps and television weather forecasts, they also underlie much of the U.S. economy and help it to function efficiently. The loss of EMC workers will be a slow-rolling catastrophe, said Larissa Reames, a meteorologist and computer scientist who was one of the EMC staff until last week. It’s going to be a massive communication breakdown. Computer weather models are a vastly complex assemblage of physics equations and data processing algorithms that constantly input weather observations from NOAAs fleet of satellites, radar, and weather stations around the world. Maintaining, improving, and tracking the performance of those models is the main goal of the EMC. By losing key staff members like Reames, who had decades of experience working with NOAAs weather models, Americas weather predicting abilities will likely suffer. Reames led a team of scientists working to unify and upgrade the core capabilities of a group of NOAAs primary weather forecasting models. On a day-to-day basis, that meant having lots of conversations with experts who have specific knowledge of the models subsystems and working to unify and streamline their input. As she describes it, getting the people who are actually doing the nitty-gritty part of the model development the right tools to understand what they can do better. For Reames, losing her job may mean an end to a 20-year career in computer weather modeling. Shes now considering a job doing software development in the private sector, but admits she has no idea what that might entail. It’s overwhelming to think about what I’m going to have to do, said Reames. I don’t know any of the languages they use, but I have the skills to learn them. The cuts to NOAA appeared to be made without regard to continuity of the services it provides. Hundreds of scientists, technicians, and support staff were given just two hours to vacate their workplaces and didnt have time to properly transition their roles to other colleagues. By diverting people like Reames to the private sector, institutional knowledge of how NOAAs weather models function will be lost. Other essential parts of federal disaster management, like FEMA and the agencies that manage public lands have also been hamstrung by staff cuts to probationary employees and strict spending limits. For many fired NOAA employees, the cuts brought a harsh conclusion to a lifelong dream of public service in the earth sciences. Francis Tarasiewicz grew up in southern New England, not far from Boston. He became a storm spotter, then an observer on Mount Washington in New Hampshire, and worked in grad school with emergency managers to understand how they use weather information. Tarasiewicz had started work at the Boston NWS office only in January as a shift forecaster, responsible for liaising with emergency management officials during periods of severe weather. I grew up in foster care and have overcome a lot of obstacles just to live a normal life, let alone deeply serve the people of my community, Tarasiewicz said. It was like a one in a million chance there. The NWS as a whole lost about 10% of its staff last week, but those cuts werent made with regard to geography or the population each office serves. Boston was especially hard-hit. (In an email, an NWS spokesperson said they don’t comment on personnel or management issues.) After the departure of Tarasiewicz and three other colleagues, the NWS office in Boston is now down to just seven meteorologists, four fewer than are needed to run itaround the clock with even minimal staffing. That means meteorologists in Boston will need to perform the duties of multiple staff members at once. Since the NWS works around the clock, it will also mean performing those duties with fewer hours of rest in between shifts. The meteorologist in charge of my office had no idea this was coming, said Tarasiewicz. I’ve never seen a boss of mine break down in tears. If he cant get his job back at NWS, Tarasiewicz wants to work in climatebut is reluctant to consider a job in the private sector. He has honed his skill set specifically to assist government and public safety officials during inclement weather and feels discouraged at the thought that he might end up in a role with a narrower focus, as might be the case if he worked as a forecaster for a private company. The whole reason I decided to work for the weather service was to maximize my impact on the world, said Tarasiewicz. As severe as the cuts are, they could be just the beginning. Reports say Elon Musks so-called Department of Government Efficiency plans to cut NOAAs staffing by up to 50%, and has already moved to cancel key building leases in Oklahoma and at Marylands Center for Weather and Climate Prediction, where Reames worked.
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E-Commerce
Mid-aughts news aggregator Digg is making a comeback, thanks to a pairing that would have seemd unlikely when the site debuted in 2004: Digg founder Kevin Rose and a former corporate rival, Reddit cofounder and former CEO Alexis Ohanian. The pair bought Digg from its prior owners Money Group in early 2025 for an undisclosed sum. The deal was supported by True Ventures, which counts Rose as a partner, as well as Ohanians Seven Seven Six fund. They know this is an unlikely pairing. I really disliked you for a long time, Ohanian told Rose during an interview with Fast Company. Reddit had raised $12,000 at YC. We felt like outsiders. Here was a tech celebrity who had VC funding, was in Silicon Valley . . . This was the birth of the new web 2.0 era. And he was getting the press, he was getting the funding. The animosity was mutual. When I first heard about Reddit, I remember somebody was like, oh, there’s this site that does voting like you guys do, Rose recalled. And I went to the site, and I was like, oh, those motherfuckersthey just copied our shit. And I was pissed. Two decades later, Reddit is a publicly traded company with a $28 billion market capitalization and reigns supreme as the true front page of the internet, while Digg is a footnote in mid-aughts internet history. Rose has spent much of the time since Digg investing in companieshis fund has poured money into Fitbit, Peloton, and Ring, among others. Over the years, however, Rose and Ohanian met and realized they had a lot in common and struck up a friendship. Now, Ohanian, who resigned from the Reddit board in 2020, is ready to help revive a company that he long warred with. He and Rose, along with Diggs new CEO, web3 entrepreneur Justin Mezzell, want to reimagine social media, creating what they describe as an online ecosystem with better vibes than todays combative platforms. Reviving Digg from obscurity Digg launched in 2004 where users could digg or bury contentsimilar to Reddits upvote and downvote systema crowdsourced way to determine what made the sites homepage. At its peak in 2009, Digg had about 44 million users and was a major driver of traffic to news organizations. After a messy redesign in 2010 alienated users, the site lost users and never really recovered. It was sold to the incubator Betaworks in 2012 for a reported $500,000 despite raising $45 million from venture capital. (Though LinkedIn bought its assets and patents for a rumored $4 million while the Washington Post hired much of its staff.) It was later sold to an adtech firm called BuySellAds in 2018 and then Money Group, which was its final steward before this sale. Despite numerous relaunches, Digg never recaptured its place in internet glory or its cultural relevance. Improving the internets vibe Rose and Ohanian share a common critique that todays social media landscape has become toxic and exhausting. They simply want to bring good vibes back to the social webif thats possible. Dude, its the vibes. Nostalgia is so hot right now, Ohanian told me. Were in our early 40s. Weve got kids. Our perspective on the world has shifted a lot. I am nostalgic for the internet forums, essentially. Forums taught me how to fix my computer. Strangers on the internet when I was a dorky teenager were willing to teach me things with their time because of this very simple software. The internet he said was smaller and felt less broken. Rose wants to use artificial intelligence to handle the janitorial work of content moderation, freeing community members and leaders to handle more fulfilling tasks. They didnt expand on this vision, but content moderation has been a hot topic of late with Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, aggressively rolling back its content moderation policies after Twitter, now X under Elon Musk, did the same. The dream is you can build a viable, healthy, great business with your users in a way that aligns their goals, their outcomes, Ohanian said. That is the dream scenario. An aggregator for a new era The new Digg will depart from social media conventions in several ways, though Rose is hesitant to disclose much of what the team is working on. He does share that the site wont have follower counts, an intention to move away from what he calls popularity contests that are common on social media. He also wants to give community members more ownership over their audiences, but didnt give specifics how. It’s insane to me that someone would spend five years of their life building up a community of millions of members and have basically no ownership over that community, he said. The site will ultimately have what Rose called good vibes, throwback, fresh coat of paint thats familiar to original Digg users but modernized for 2025. Digg will roll out invitations to the platform in the coming weeks and Rose said he wants to grow the sites user base, which he says currently stands at 600,000 monthly users, to 20 million before committing to a specific revenue model (Twitter competitor Bluesky managed to gain 30 million followers in roughly a year from launch.) Rose says until then, the company is well capitalized. Rose says he doesnt want to replace social media, but give a different experience and new ideaseven if theyre reminiscent of the past. This is not about you reading a headline three months from now that Digg has replaced Reddit, he says. Thats not the goal here. Its to reimagine whats possible. Ohanian adds that the intent is about more than just a nostalgia play. Even on day one, I hope someone who’s never been to Digg is like, this feels fun. The internet can be fun.
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E-Commerce
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