U.S. Army aviators and National Guard aviation officers spent a week this summer flying a virtual MV-75 Cheyenne II, critiquing cockpits and rehearsing maintenance in virtual reality, as the service brings soldiers into the tiltrotor’s design before the first test aircraft has flown. The sixth MV-75 Special User Evaluation ran Aug. 24 to 28 at […]

The Liberty Bell, with its famous crack, hasn't been rung in 180 years, but that hasn't stopped scientists from pondering what the bell might have sounded like when tolling. In honor of the nation's 250th anniversary, researchers at Penn State University have modeled its acoustic properties, drawing on data collected from one of the bell's replicas. The work was first presented at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Philadelphia earlier this year, followed by an article in Physics Today.

Historians aren't sure exactly when the Liberty Bell acquired its distinctive crack, just that it occurred sometime between 1817 and 1846. An 1846 account in the Public Ledger described the ringing of the bell on February 23 that year and mentioned that the bell had developed a crack, which someone had attempted to fix by filing the sides down. But it didn't work: The February 23 ringing extended the crack even more, so much so that "the old Independence Bell ... now hangs in the great steeple irreparably cracked and forever dumb." Nobody has heard it ring since.

This wasn't the first time the bell had cracked; the rim cracked shortly after it arrived in Philadelphia in 1752, the first time the clapper struck while testing the sound. It was recast by two local foundry workers, John Pass and John Stow, not once but twice, because the first recast produced a sound that one bystander likened to coal scuttles banging together.

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— Ravi Vedula, a corporate vice president at Microsoft, is leaving the company after 26 years. Vedula, who is based in the Seattle area, led an organization of more than 1,000 people that runs the data and analytics platform behind Microsoft 365 and Copilot.

“26 years. It’s time,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “Goodbye and thank you, Microsoft. It’s been a privilege. I gave it my all.”

Vedula joined Microsoft in 2000 and was the first engineering manager for Exchange Online.

His memoir, “Hyderabad Days: The code we lived by before we coded,” was published in March by Microsoft’s 8080 Books. It recounts his childhood in a government housing colony in Hyderabad, India, with each chapter followed by a lesson about leadership, engineering or life, as GeekWire reported at the time.

“I leave with gratitude for the people and experiences that shaped those years,” Vedula told GeekWire.

He said he is leaving room for “another professional chapter if the right opportunity comes along,” but for now plans to focus on travel, ways to contribute and writing, including a possible book based on his experiences receiving a heart transplant in 2017.

— AI and robotics company Boston Dynamics announced Rohit Prasad as its new CEO, effective Oct. 7. Prasad, who is based in the Boston area, was Amazon’s senior vice president and head scientist for artificial general intelligence until he left the company at the end of 2025.

He takes over from interim CEO Amanda McMaster, the company’s chief financial officer, after Robert Playter retired in February following more than 30 years at Boston Dynamics. Hyundai Motor Group holds a controlling stake in the company.

Prasad joined Amazon in 2013, during the early days of Alexa, and oversaw the creation of its Nova AI models. Boston Dynamics makes the Spot and Stretch robots and is developing the Atlas humanoid. Prasad is also expected to join the company’s board, subject to approval.

“Boston Dynamics is uniquely positioned to advance Physical AI through its world-class robotics expertise,” Prasad said in the announcement.

— Qualtrics has appointed Mike Potter chief technology officer of the experience management company. He joins from Petal, an Ontario healthcare company, and has worked in leadership at Qlik, IBM and Cognos.

“I have spent the better part of my career building platforms at scale, the kind of work that requires deep technical conviction, strong collaboration, and a relentless focus on what customers actually need. That is what drew me to Qualtrics,” Potter said.

Qualtrics has dual headquarters in Seattle and Provo, Utah. It recently cut 117 jobs connected to its Seattle operations, largely affecting engineering and product teams. Last year, the company spent $6.75 billion to acquire Press Ganey Forsta.

— Shawn Stapleton has been named vice president and chief AI and innovation officer, a newly created role at Fred Hutch Cancer Center. He joins the Seattle nonprofit from MD Anderson Cancer Center, where he led AI lifecycle management for more than three years. Before that, he was the Seattle-based head of data science for Philips.

Stapleton helped scale MD Anderson’s AI initiatives across clinical, research and administrative settings, Fred Hutch said, adding, “His experience at the intersection of strategy, governance and implementation will be instrumental as we continue building the foundation for AI-enabled medicine and discovery.”

— Seattle-based defense tech startup Overland AI has named Jon Abramovic as vice president of international growth. Abramovic has held sales leadership roles in Taiwan, Prague and Beijing. He was most recently director of global defense sales at SIG Sauer and spent eight years at Oshkosh Defense leading business development across Europe and Asia.

“Having spent years operating overseas, I’ve seen firsthand what our allies face against near-peer adversaries and what it takes to stay ahead. Overland AI’s technology represents a generational leap in the ground domain,” Abramovic said.

Overland AI is No. 7 in the GeekWire 200, a ranking of the region’s top privately held tech startups.

— Noosphere Labs, a Seattle-area AI startup first covered by GeekWire in August, has announced its leadership team. The company, launched by former Meta AI research director Kevin Carlberg, is pursuing “human-centered physical intelligence” — AI designed to help people interact with and make sense of the physical world, beyond text and images on screens.

Its team includes:

• Tyler Simpson, co-founder and chief operating officer, who left Meta to start Noosphere Labs. He previously was co-founder and CTO of Luum by HealthEquity and spent more than 11 years at Microsoft.
• Andrew Ma, engineering leader, has more than 20 years’ experience across Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft, most recently leading Google Cloud’s Apache Spark teams.
• Joshua Walton, founding design partner, was a director at Meta Reality Labs Research and worked on Microsoft’s HoloLens.
• Louis Barinaga, founding hardware partner, spent the bulk of his career at HP and more recently held leadership roles at Meta’s augmented reality program, Valve and Microsoft.
• Andrew Smith, founding AI engineer, led Zillow’s first agentic AI system and previously worked for Amazon and Sandia National Laboratories.
• Michael Iuzzolino, founding AI engineer, joined from Meta, where he worked on large language models, and previously held roles at Google Brain and Microsoft Research.
• Mikhail Shashkov, founding architect, was at Amazon Lab126 for more than seven years and previously at Sandia.

— Liz Pearce has been named Earth Finance‘s first chief commercial officer. She joined from Ever.green, where she was chief revenue officer. Past roles include CEO of LiquidPlanner, co-founder and CEO of Fresh Chalk, and vice president of marketing for GoDaddy.

Earth Finance, a Seattle-based startup helping businesses reduce their climate impacts, recently launched a platform called SpatiaFi that enables customers to make location-based capital decisions.

“Earth Finance is already delivering game-changing results for customers,” Pearce said. “I can’t wait to get to work with this team to scale that impact.”

— Charlie Bell, the longtime Amazon Web Services executive who left to run security, compliance and identity at Microsoft, has been appointed to the board of directors at the cybersecurity firm Tenable. The appointment was disclosed in an SEC filing and framed as “reinforcement for Tenable’s AI-driven exposure management push.”

— Two notable Amazon moves:

• Fırat Güder, a professor and chief engineer of Güder Research Group at Imperial College London, has joined Amazon as a scholar in the tech giant’s special projects organization. “Here, we are building the next generation of cutting-edge technologies that define the future of humanity. It is an incredible honor to join a small, elite group of innovators and researchers pushing the boundaries of what is possible,” Güder said.
• Leonardo de Moura has been promoted to vice president and distinguished scientist with AWS in Seattle. He joined the company in 2023.

— Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) has named Amelia Marckworth director of programs, innovation and entrepreneurship. She joins from Seattle University, where she has held leadership roles for more than a decade and also served as an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship in the Albers School of Business and Economics.

“Amelia has a proven track record of launching and growing startup programs, coaching founders directly, and being part of WTIA as a committee member and mentor. We’re excited to bring that experience and talent onto our startups team,” Randa Minkarah, WTIA’s executive director and CEO, said in a statement.

— Hernan Alvarez has taken a role at Seattle-based Hyperparam to lead product and go-to-market at the startup, which is building tools for collecting, storing and analyzing the data that AI systems produce. The company recently launched a product called HypAware to improve oversight of AI agents and catch their errors.

Alvarez joins from Great Expectations, where he was CEO. He earlier worked with Hyperparam founder Kenny Daniel at Algorithmia, a machine learning company co-founded by Daniel and acquired by DataRobot.

— Philip Jensen has joined Zap Energy as vice president of fuel programs and operations. Zap, an Everett, Wash.-based fusion startup, announced in April that it was expanding its focus to include nuclear fission. Jensen was previously at First American Nuclear and spent more than seven years at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Zap said Jensen “brings deep expertise in nuclear fuel design, testing, and manufacturing, and a track record of launching new fuel programs and partnerships.”

— Christie Johansen-Pinney has joined Noble Studios as its Seattle-based vice president of client experience. She has held VP roles at firms including Rooster Punk, DEPT and The Marketing Practice.

— Anders Mortensen, formerly CRO at The Trade Desk, has been appointed to the advisory board of Scowtt, a Seattle startup helping advertisers optimize their ad spending. Mortensen spent more than 13 years at Google, leaving as vice president of U.S. mid-market sales lead generation.