Mark Griffith — Amazon employee No. 1,037 and the third hire for what would become Fulfillment by Amazon — is retiring after more than two decades with the Seattle-area tech giant.

Griffith spent most of his career at FBA, which handles shipping, customer service, and returns for third-party businesses. He was director of software engineering for FBA and then for Amazon payments. His final role was director of seller fulfillment services.

Griffith penned a lengthy reflection on Substack in which he shares his career journey, what he learned from working at the company, and pithy personal and professional advice.

“I have given my ALL to Amazon for 8 hours+ a day for a long time – but I’ve never given it everything – that is too dangerous – I don’t live to work – I work to live. I work hard; I try to work empathetically and smart and help others – but I am ready to let others carry on,” Griffith said.

— DigitalOcean named Vinay Kumar as chief product and technology officer of the infrastructure-as-a-service company. Kumar, based in Seattle, was previously with Oracle for more than 11 years, leaving the role of senior vice president of cloud engineering.

Paddy Srinivasan, CEO of DigitalOcean, highlighted Kumar’s experience building cloud and AI platforms at scale, his “tremendous product strategy acumen” and his understanding of the “operational rigor required for mission-critical workloads.”

— Chris Hundley has joined Seattle RFID tech company Impinj as executive VP of enterprise solutions.

“Impinj has built an incredible foundation as the market leader in RAIN RFID, with strong momentum helping businesses wirelessly connect billions of items across use cases including loss prevention, shipment verification, and asset management,” Hundley said on LinkedIn.

Hundley is the founder and former CEO of the marketing automation startup Siftrock, which was acquired by Drift in 2018. He was also chief technology officer and president of AudioEye, which aimed to make digital technology inclusive for people with disabilities.

— Lindsay Bayne is now senior director of advocacy at UiPath, a New York-based company that helps businesses automate repetitive, complex tasks.

Bayne was previously at Microsoft for more than a decade, leaving the role of director of the Growth Innovation and Strategy Team.

“I’m honored to join and partner with this incredibly talented team, advocate for our incredible customers, and help showcase the real-world impact of automation and AI,” Bayne said on LinkedIn.

— Christin Camacho is now head of go-to-market for BuildQ, an AI platform for clean energy development and due diligence. Camacho joins the company following nearly seven years at LevelTen Energy, a Seattle-based clean energy marketplace, where she served as vice president of marketing. She previously worked at Redfin.

“BuildQ’s AI accelerates every stage of development for large wind, solar, and storage projects. Ultimately, that means more clean energy projects get built, faster, and that’s a mission I’ve dedicated my career to,” Camacho said via email.

In her new role, Camacho will work with Maryssa Barron, a former LevelTen colleague and founder and CEO of BuildQ.

— Lowell Bander, founding general manager of Seattle’s 9Zero, is changing roles at the climate tech entrepreneurial hub. Bander is taking the title of ecosystem advisor as the organization looks for a new leader. Bander is also an advisor on Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson’s transportation and environment transition team.

— Nate Frazier is now community liaison for the Oregon AI Accelerator. The Portland organization aims to coordinate the state’s entrepreneurial groups, investors and universities to foster AI innovation.

— The Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology has named the first cohort for its SeaBridge Fellowship, a research training program. In March, the effort received a $10 million grant from the Washington Research Foundation. The scientists will receive two years of financial support plus funding for career development, mentorship training and networking. They include:

• Changho Chun, a postdoctoral scholar in the University of Washington’s Department of Rehabilitation Medicine who is doing research that could aid in treating ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease).
• Ian Linde, a postdoc in the Public Health Sciences Division at Fred Hutch Cancer Center studying the conditions under which gene mutations lead to breast cancer tumors.
• Abigail Nagle, a postdoc in the UW Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology investigating communications between connective tissue and heart muscle tissue.
• Stephanie Sansbury, a postdoc in the UW Department of Biochemistry and Institute for Protein Design researching processes around engineered protein nanoparticles in pursuit of therapeutics.
• Zachary Stevenson, a postdoc in the UW Department of Genome Sciences studying synthetic cellular circuits to broaden the scope of cell programming.
• Julie Trolle, a postdoc in the UW Department of Genome Sciences aiming to engineer cancer-fighting T cells that express multiple genes, thereby improving their ability to kill tumor cells.
• Arata Wakimoto, a postdoc in the UW Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology investigating embryonic development as relates to congenital spine and neural tube disorders.
• Rachel Wellington, a postdoc in Translational Science and Therapeutics Division of Fred Hutch researching cellular recording technologies in the differentiation of stem cells.

Far Side fans might recall a classic 1982 cartoon called "Cow Tools," featuring a cow standing next to a jumble of strange objects—the joke being that cows don't use tools. That's why a pet Swiss brown cow in Austria named Veronika has caused a bit of a sensation: she likes to pick up random sticks and use them to scratch herself. According to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology, this is a form of multipurpose tool use and suggests that the cognitive capabilities of cows have been underestimated by scientists.

As previously reported, tool use was once thought to be one of the defining features of humans, but examples of it were eventually observed in primates and other mammals. Dolphins can toss objects as a form of play, which some scientists consider to be a type of tool use, particularly when it involves another member of the same species. Potential purposes include a means of communication, social bonding, or aggressiveness. (Octopuses have also been observed engaging in similar throwing behavior.)

But the biggest surprise came when birds were observed using tools in the wild. After all, birds are the only surviving dinosaurs, and mammals and dinosaurs hadn’t shared a common ancestor for hundreds of millions of years. In the wild, observed tool use has been limited to the corvids (crows and jays), which show a variety of other complex behaviors—they’ll remember your face and recognize the passing of their dead.

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In 2024, scientists announced the discovery of a new species of giant anaconda in South America. A National Geographic camera crew was on hand for the 2022 expedition that documented the new species—and so was actor Will Smith, since they were filming for NatGeo's new documentary series, Pole to Pole with Will Smith. Now we can all share in Smith's Amazon experience, courtesy of the three-minute clip above.

Along with venom expert Bryan Fry, we follow Smith's journey by boat with a team of indigenous Waorani guides, scouring the river banks for anacondas. And they find one: a female green anaconda about 16 to 17 feet long, "pure muscle." The Waorani secure the giant snake—anacondas aren't venomous but they do bite—so that Fry (with Smith's understandably reluctant help) can collect a scale sample for further analysis. Fry says that this will enable him to determine the accumulation of pollutants in the water.

That and other collected samples also enabled scientists to conduct the genetic analysis that resulted in the declaration of a new species: the northern green anaconda (Eunectes akayama, which roughly translates to "the great snake"). It is genetically distinct from the southern green anaconda (Eunectes murinus); the two species likely diverged some 10 million years ago. The northern green anaconda's turf includes Venezuela, Colombia, Suriname, French Guyana, and the northern part of Brazil.

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In sending a car-sized rotorcraft to explore Saturn’s moon Titan, NASA’s Dragonfly mission will undertake an unprecedented voyage of scientific discovery. And the work to ensure that this first-of-its-kind project can fulfill its ambitious exploration vision is underway in some of the nation’s most advanced space simulation and testing laboratories.

Set for launch in in 2028, the Dragonfly rotorcraft is being designed and built at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, with contributions from organizations around the world. On arrival in 2034, Dragonfly will exploit Titan’s dense atmosphere and low gravity to fly to dozens of locations, exploring varied environments from organic equatorial dunes to an impact crater where liquid water and complex organic materials essential to life (at least as we know it) may have existed together.

Aerodynamic testing

When full rotorcraft integration and testing begins in February, the team will tap into a trove of data gathered through critical technical trials conducted over the past three years, including, most recently, two campaigns at the Transonic Dynamics Tunnel (TDT) facility at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

The TDT is a versatile 16-foot-high, 16-foot-wide, 20-foot-long testing hub that has hosted studies for NASA, the Department of War, the aircraft industry and an array of universities.

Over five weeks, from August into September, the team evaluated the performance of Dragonfly’s rotor system – which provides the lift for the lander to fly and enables it to maneuver – in Titan-like conditions, looking at aeromechanical performance factors such as stress on the rotor arms, and effects of vibration on the rotor blades and lander body. In late December, the team also wrapped up a set of aerodynamics tests on smaller-scale Dragonfly rotor models in the TDT.

“When Dragonfly enters the atmosphere at Titan and parachutes deploy after the heat shield does its job, the rotors are going to have to work perfectly the first time,” said Dave Piatak, branch chief for aeroelasticity at NASA Langley. “There’s no room for error, so any concerns with vehicle structural dynamics or aerodynamics need to be known now and tested on the ground. With the Transonic Dynamics Tunnel here at Langley, NASA offers just the right capability for the Dragonfly team to gather this critical data.”

Critical parts

In his three years as an experimental machinist at APL, Cory Pennington has crafted parts for projects dispatched around the globe. But fashioning rotors for a drone to explore another world in our solar system? That was new – and a little daunting.

“The rotors are some of the most important parts on Dragonfly,” Pennington said. “Without the rotors, it doesn’t fly – and it doesn’t meet its mission objectives at Titan.”

Pennington and team cut Dragonfly’s first rotors on Nov. 1, 2024. They refined the process as they went: starting with waterjet paring of 1,000-pound aluminum blocks, followed by rough machining, cover fitting, vent-hole drilling and hole-threading. After an inspection, the parts were cleaned, sent out for welding and returned for final finishing.

“We didn’t have time or materials to make test parts or extras, so every cut had to be right the first time,” Pennington said, adding that the team also had to find special tools and equipment to accommodate some material changes and design tweaks.

The team was able to deliver the parts a month early. Engineers set up and spin-tested the rotors at APL – attached to a full-scale model representing half of the Dragonfly lander – before transporting the entire package to the TDT at NASA Langley in late July.

“On Titan, we’ll control the speeds of Dragonfly’s different rotors to induce forward flight, climbs, descents and turns,” said Felipe Ruiz, lead Dragonfly rotor engineer at APL.

“It’s a complicated geometry going to a flight environment that we are still learning about. So the wind tunnel tests are one of the most important venues for us to demonstrate the design.”

And the rotors passed the tests.

“Not only did the tests validate the design team’s approach, we’ll use all that data to create high-fidelity representations of loads, forces and dynamics that help us predict Dragonfly’s performance on Titan with a high degree of confidence,” said Rick Heisler, wind tunnel test lead from APL.

Next, the rotors will undergo fatigue and cryogenic trials under simulated Titan conditions, where the temperature is minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 178 degrees Celsius), before building the actual flight rotors.

“We’re not just cutting metal — we’re fabricating something that’s going to another world,” Pennington said. “It’s incredible to know that what we build will fly on Titan.”

Collaboration, innovation

Elizabeth “Zibi” Turtle, Dragonfly principal investigator at APL, says the latest work in the TDT demonstrates the mission’s innovation, ingenuity and collaboration across government and industry.

“The team worked well together, under time pressure, to develop solutions, assess design decisions, and execute fabrication and testing,” she said. “There’s still much to do between now and our launch in 2028, but everyone who worked on this should take tremendous pride in these accomplishments that make it possible for Dragonfly to fly on Titan.”

Dragonfly has been a collaborative effort from the start. Kenneth Hibbard, mission systems engineer from APL, cites the vertical-lift expertise of Penn State University on the initial rotor design, aero-related modeling and analysis, and testing support in the TDT, as well as NASA Langley’s 14-by-22-foot Subsonic Tunnel. Sikorsky Aircraft of Connecticut has also supported aeromechanics and aerodynamics testing and analysis, as well as flight hardware modeling and simulation.

The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, leads the Dragonfly mission for NASA in collaboration with several NASA centers, industry partners, academic institutions and international space agencies. Elizabeth “Zibi” Turtle of APL is the principal investigator. Dragonfly is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, managed by the Planetary Missions Program Office at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information on NASA’s Dragonfly mission, visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/dragonfly/

by Mike Buckley
Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory

MEDIA CONTACTS:

Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
Headquarters, Washington
240-285-5155 / 240-419-1732
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov

Joe Atkinson
NASA’s Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia
757-755-5375
joseph.s.atkinson@nasa.gov

Mike Buckley
Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland
443-567-3145
michael.buckley@jhuapl.edu

NASA announced Monday the selection of industry proposals to advance technologies for the agency’s Habitable Worlds Observatory concept – the first mission that would directly image Earth-like planets around stars like our Sun and study the chemical composition of their atmospheres for signs of life. This flagship space telescope also would enable wide-ranging studies of our universe and support future human exploration of Mars, our solar system, and beyond.

“The Habitable Worlds Observatory is exactly the kind of bold, forward-leaning science that only NASA can undertake,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “Humanity is waiting for the breakthroughs this mission is capable of achieving and the questions it could help us answer about life in the universe. We intend to move with urgency, and expedite timelines to the greatest extent possible to bring these discoveries to the world.”

To achieve its science goals, the Habitable Worlds Observatory would need a stable optical system that moves no more than the width of an atom while it conducts observations. The mission also would require a coronagraph – an instrument that blocks the light of a star to better see its orbiting planets – thousands of times more capable than any space coronagraph ever built. The Habitable Worlds Observatory would be designed to allow servicing in space, to extend its lifetime and bolster its science over time.

To further the readiness of these technologies, NASA has selected proposals for three-year, fixed-price contracts from the following companies:

• Astroscale U.S. Inc., Denver
• BAE Systems Space and Mission Systems, Inc., Boulder, Colorado
• Busek Co. Inc, Natick, Massachusetts
• L3Harris Technologies Inc., Rochester, New York
• Lockheed Martin Inc., Palo Alto, California
• Northrop Grumman Inc., Redondo Beach, California
• Zecoat Co. Inc., Granite City, Illinois

“Are we alone in the universe? is an audacious question to answer, but one that our nation is poised to pursue, leveraging the groundwork we’ve laid from previous NASA flagship missions. With the Habitable Worlds Observatory, NASA will chart new frontiers for humanity’s exploration of the cosmos,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Awards like these are a critical component of our incubator program for future missions, which combines government leadership with commercial innovation to make what is impossible today rapidly implementable in the future.”

The newly selected proposals build on previous industry involvement, which began in 2017 under NASA’s “System-Level Segmented Telescope Design” solicitations and continued with awards for large space telescope technologies in 2024. The newly selected proposals will help inform NASA’s approach to planning for the Habitable Worlds Observatory concept, as the agency builds on technologies and lessons learned from its Hubble Space Telescope, James Webb Space Telescope, and upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

To learn more about NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory, visit:

https://nasa.gov/hwo

-end-

Alise Fisher
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-2546
alise.m.fisher@nasa.gov

A key discovery from NASA’s Cassini mission in 2008 was that Saturn’s largest moon Titan may have a vast water ocean below its hydrocarbon-rich surface. But reanalysis of mission data suggests a more complicated picture: Titan’s interior is more likely composed of ice, with layers of slush and small pockets of warm water that form near its rocky core.  

Led by researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, the new study could have implications for scientists’ understanding of Titan and other icy moons throughout our solar system. 

“This research underscores the power of archival planetary science data. It is important to remember that the data these amazing spacecraft collect lives on so discoveries can be made years, or even decades, later as analysis techniques get more sophisticated,” said Julie Castillo-Rogez, senior research scientist at JPL and a coauthor of the study. “It’s the gift that keeps giving.” 

To remotely probe planets, moons, and asteroids, scientists study the radio frequency communications traveling back and forth between spacecraft and NASA’s Deep Space Network. It’s a multilayered process. Because a moon’s body may not have a uniform distribution of mass, its gravity field will change as a spacecraft flies through it, causing the spacecraft to speed up or slow down slightly. In turn, these variations in speed alter the frequency of the radio waves going to and from the spacecraft — an effect known as Doppler shift. Analyzing the Doppler shift can lend insight into a moon’s gravity field and its shape, which can change over time as it orbits within its parent planet’s gravitational pull. 

This shape shifting is called tidal flexing. In Titan’s case, Saturn’s immense gravitational field squeezes the moon when Titan is closer to the planet during its slightly elliptical orbit, and it stretches the moon when it is farthest. Such flexing creates energy that is lost, or dissipated, in the form of internal heating. 

When mission scientists analyzed radio-frequency data gathered during the now-retired Cassini mission’s 10 close approaches of Titan, they found the moon to be flexing so much that they concluded it must have a liquid interior, since a solid interior would have flexed far less. (Think of a balloon filled with water versus a billiard ball.)  

New technique 

The new research highlights another possible explanation for this malleability: an interior composed of layers featuring a mix of ice and water that allows the moon to flex. In this scenario, there would be a lag of several hours between Saturn’s tidal pull and when the moon shows signs of flexing — much slower than if the interior were fully liquid. A slushy interior would also exhibit a stronger energy dissipation signature in the moon’s gravity field than a liquid one, because these slush layers would generate friction and produce heat when the ice crystals rub against one another. But there was nothing apparent in the data to suggest this was happening. 

So the study authors, led by JPL postdoctoral researcher Flavio Petricca, looked more closely at the Doppler data to see why. By applying a novel processing technique, they reduced the noise in the data. What emerged was a signature that revealed strong energy loss deep inside Titan. The researchers interpreted this signature to be coming from layers of slush, overlaid by a thick shell of solid ice. 

Based on this new model of Titan’s interior, the researchers suggest that the only liquid would be in the form of pockets of meltwater. Heated by dissipating tidal energy, the water pockets slowly travel toward the frozen layers of ice at the surface. As they rise, they have the potential to create unique environments enriched by organic molecules being supplied from below and from material delivered via meteorite impacts on the surface.  

“Nobody was expecting very strong energy dissipation inside Titan. But by reducing the noise in the Doppler data, we could see these smaller wiggles emerge. That was the smoking gun that indicates Titan’s interior is different from what was inferred from previous analyses,” said Petricca. “The low viscosity of the slush still allows the moon to bulge and compress in response to Saturn’s tides, and to remove the heat that would otherwise melt the ice and form an ocean.” 

Potential for life 

“While Titan may not possess a global ocean, that doesn’t preclude its potential for harboring basic life forms, assuming life could form on Titan. In fact, I think it makes Titan more interesting,” Petricca added. “Our analysis shows there should be pockets of liquid water, possibly as warm as 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit), cycling nutrients from the moon’s rocky core through slushy layers of high-pressure ice to a solid icy shell at the surface.” 

More definitive information could come from NASA’s next mission to Saturn. Launching no earlier than 2028, the agency’s Dragonfly mission to the hazy moon could provide the ground truth. The first-of-its-kind rotorcraft will explore Titan’s surface to investigate the moon’s habitability. Carrying a seismometer, the mission may provide key measurements to probe Titan’s interior, depending on what seismic events occur while it is on the surface. 

More about Cassini 

The Cassini-Huygens mission was a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (European Space Agency), and the Italian Space Agency. A division of Caltech in Pasadena, JPL managed the mission for NASA’s Space Mission Directorate in Washington and designed, developed, and assembled the Cassini orbiter. 

To learn more about NASA’s Cassini mission, visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/cassini/

News Media Contacts 

Ian J. O’Neill 
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 
818-354-2649 
ian.j.oneill@jpl.nasa.gov 

Karen Fox / Alana Johnson 
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600 / 202-358-1501 
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov 

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