Alexis Elmore talks to the director of the national lab’s nuclear energy and fuel cycle division about major projects and major innovation in the revived nuclear sector.
One is Ant International’s new office in Kuala Lumpur. The other is the recently established Forest City Special Financial Zone in an area some call a “ghost city” after the pandemic slowed development.
Electric propulsion company Evolito this week announced a collaboration with Flying Whales, which is developing large capacity airships for “sustainable cargo aviation.” Evolito said its motor would propel the LCA60T airship, a 200-meter-long aircraft designed to transport loads up to 60 metric tons that is due to make its debut test flight in 2027. Based in Oxford, England, Evolito’s investors include B-Flexion and Oxford Science Enterprises. Flying Whales is a consortium of some 50 well-heeled partners whose head office is located in Suresnes in the Paris region of France and whose marketing and design teams are partially based in Montréal. Use cases for the airship range from deliveries to disaster sites and remote locations to ferrying lumber, shipping containers, wind turbine components or mobile hospitals.
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The grand opening of the company’s new $225 million facility in Jacksonville in October might never have happened if a former governor hadn’t picked up the phone and called the company president with an invitation.
“I want CEOs to know that we are digging down into middle school to get kids ready for what happens after high school,” North Carolina Department of Public Instruction Superintendent Catherine Truitt told Site Selection in 2023 of her team’s work with Battelle for Kids.
A new white paper from not-for-profit Battelle for Kids entitled “Students as Meaning Makers: Why Academic Solutions Aren’t Enough addresses potential solutions to the documented lack of student motivation and engagement in Pre-K-12 education. “According to a recent report by The 74 Million, only 44% of 12th graders report ‘learning a great deal’ in school, compared to 86% of third graders,” the Columbus, Ohio–based organization said in a February 4 release. “The percentage of students who ‘love’ going to school plummets from 74% in third grade to 29% by 12th grade, and just 36% of middle and high school students feel they can develop their own ideas at school.”
Hope, resilience and a sense of belonging can help reverse course, Battelle for Kids avers, basing its recommendations in part on the work it’s accomplished with its Portrait of a Graduate approach (chronicled by Site Selection’s Mark Arend in this July 2023 case study from North Carolina) and at its Well-Being Lab by Battelle for Kids, based on what it calls its “Core 4 Framework — Chart Your Course, Master Your Mind, Harness Your Strengths, and Cultivate Your Community.”
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Photos courtesy of Toyota
One company seeking to empower that next generation of talent is Toyota. Toyota USA Foundation’s Driving Possibilities initiative in Michigan (above) is a collaboration with Eastern Michigan University’s College of Education with Lincoln Consolidated Schools, Ypsilanti Community Schools and Washtenaw Intermediate School District. It’s one of eight U.S. communities that have launched Driving Possibilities programs since the original program launched in West Dallas. Others are located in Scott County and Fayette County, Kentucky; the North Gibson and Evansville-Vanderburgh school corporations in southern Indiana; Huntsville, Alabama; Chandler, Arizona; Greensboro, North Carolina; Atlanta, Georgia; and Blue Springs, Mississippi (below). The company plans to expand the program where it has facilities. For more workforce insights, see the newly published Workforce 2025 publication produced by Site Selection and Conway Data.
