Innovation vs. climate change: Introducing ‘Positive Charge,’ a new GeekWire Podcast

• Two episodes are live now: destroying the "forever chemicals" in our water, and the global race to make fusion energy real. 

• Read more, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

What’s it like to “retire” in your 50s? GeekWire spoke with several longtime Microsoft employees who are taking the company's first-ever voluntary retirement program about why they decided to leave and what they're doing next. Their reasons range from timing and finances to fatigue with the pace of change. Their next chapters include startups, a doctorate, conservation work, a return to the trades and, yes, actual retirement. Read more.

“The greatest cosmic movie ever made”: Chile's new Rubin Observatory has kicked off its 10-year mission to film the night sky using a mind-blowing 3,200-megapixel camera. University of Washington researchers are leading the charge on the software side, building the tools needed to process the massive nightly stream of data. Over the next decade, this time-lapse will help scientists map millions of asteroids, track exploding stars, and unravel the mysteries of dark matter. Read more.

Hot Links:

• Bellevue-based optical AI company Alitheon won a 2026 AI Breakthrough Award for its FeaturePrint technology, which combats counterfeits by using a camera to identify an object’s unique surface structure without labels or tags. (GlobeNewswire)

• AWS is investing $1 billion in a new Forward Deployed Engineering unit, embedding AI engineers with customers to speed up deployment — becoming the first major cloud provider to formally join the FDE wave alongside OpenAI and Anthropic. (CNBC)

• Washington state posted the nation’s fastest GDP growth in Q1 at 4.5%, driven overwhelmingly by its tech-heavy information sector, which accounted for nearly three‑quarters of the state’s economic expansion. (PSBJ)