A toaster on wheels. A character out of the Pixar film “Wall-E.” A souped-up popemobile.Turns out the white autonomous shuttles moseying around Colorado School of Mines on Tuesday morning were none of the above, as onlookers observed.

Students at the Colorado School of Mines will have a new way of getting around campus these days: by driverless shuttles.

The fleet of nine driverless, zero-emission vehicles will shuttle Colorado School of Mines students and staff, as well as members of the public, from key spots in the city to various points on campus for at least the next year.

Here & Now's Peter O'Dowd speaks with Lesli Wood, professor of geology at the Colorado School of Mines.

Christopher Bellona, associate professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Colorado School of Mines, says he's been working on direct potable water use since he was a graduate student in 2001.

“Drought, climate change, wildfires and things like that, we're starting to target additional water resources that maybe we didn't really target before,” said Colorado School of Mines Associate Professor, Christopher Bellona.

A new partnership at the state’s community colleges aims to make it easier for students to transfer to the Colorado School of Mines, the state’s most selective public four-year university, by aligning academic requirements and classwork.

For Jennifer Miskimins, department head and professor of petroleum engineering at Colorado School of Mines, it’s about taking care of the data’s lifecycle and embedding it in courses.

This opinion piece was written by Mines alumnus Parker Bolstad, an active duty military intelligence officer in the U.S. Army, and Jordy Lee, the program manager for the Supply Chain Transparency Initiative at the Payne Institute for Public Policy.

Chris Higgins, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Colorado School of Mines, was among the experts interviewed for this piece about what makes PFAS chemicals extremely useful—and extremely hard to get rid of.