Two Weeks After Amazon Made Its ‘Climate Pledge,’ It Joined Big Oil for Its ‘Accelerate Production 4.0’ Event

https://gizmodo.com/two-weeks-after-amazon-made-its-climate-pledge-it-join-1838944337

Just two weeks after Amazon pledged to radically reduce its company-wide carbon emissions, the head of its oil and gas web services subsidiary traveled to Houston, Texas, to participate in the oil industry’s “Accelerate Production 4.0” event. The event was part of a conference put on by Weatherford, a major oilfield services provider, and was billed as “the U.S. oil and gas industry’s only Production 4.0 forum.” Per Weatherford, its aim was “to discuss the role of digitalization in the near and long-term future of oil and gas production.”

According to Offshore Engineer Magazine, Amazon Web Services has—along with Microsoft and IBM—partnered with Weatherford to help build its suite of Production 4.0 technologies. As the conference title indicates, these technologies are explicitly intended to accelerate and improve oil production. AWS was a Platinum sponsor of the event.

“Weatherford Production 4.0 products … activate field-wide intelligence to maximize production,” Manoj Nimbalkar, Weatherford Global Vice President, Production Automation and Software, said in a press release. “Weatherford delivers the future of production performance through next-generation automation, IoT infrastructure and advanced optimization software to boost production, uptime and efficiency.”

Boosting production will also boost the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere at a time that scientists say that most fossil fuels must be left in the ground if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change. In no uncertain terms, accelerating oil production will accelerate the advance of the climate crisis.

Amazon won headlines around the globe when CEO Jeff Bezos announced the company’s ambitious-sounding ‘Climate Pledge.’ This, Bezos said, set the online retailer on a path to 100 percent clean energy and carbon neutral shipping. The pledge was largely seen as a response to Amazon employees’ continued agitation for their company to adopt a plan to address the climate crisis.

Yet the details and specifics of the roadmap to sustainability were scarce, and when a reporter asked Bezos if he would be canceling his company’s contracts with the oil and gas industry, his response was simple: “No.”

“We’re going to work hard for energy companies,” he continued. “And our view is we’re going to work very hard to make sure that as they transition they have the best tools possible.”

Bezos is certainly making good on his word.

Corporations typically host a presence at trade conferences like this to advertise their services and network with prospective clients in hopes of attracting new business. By sponsoring this event, and by sending David Milam, AWS’s Head of Oil & Gas Solutions, to give a keynote talk—mere weeks after Amazon made a highly publicized pledge to reduce carbon emissions and embrace clean energy, no less—the company is sending a clear signal that it will remain wide open to the business of advancing and technologically improving fossil fuel production.

It is quite literally underwriting “Accelerating Oil Production 4.0.”

Amazon may say it is dedicated to being a part of the solution to climate change—and it may yet make good on its commitments to power its own operations with clean energy and reduce its shipping emissions. But by simultaneously helping oil and gas companies develop new technologies to automate, streamline, and accelerate the extraction of fossil fuels, Amazon is undermining both its own claims to sincerity and any net carbon reductions it might make.

Worse, by helping to keep oil cheaper and more plentiful, Amazon and other tech companies assisting in oil extraction are delaying the transition they claim to want to help advance. If Amazon is serious about its climate pledge, it needs to be in the business of decelerating fossil fuel production, not the opposite.

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment, and Weatherford declined to do so.

via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com

October 10, 2019 at 01:15PM

MIT Confirms a Bridge Leonardo da Vinci Designed 500 Years Ago Was an Ancient Engineering Marvel

https://gizmodo.com/mit-confirms-a-bridge-leonardo-da-vinci-designed-500-ye-1838937809

Masters of engineering student Karly Bast shows off the scale model of a bridge designed by Leonardo da Vinci that she and her co-workers used to prove the design’s feasibility.
Photo: Gretchen Ertl (MIT)

Some 500 years after his death, researchers are still discovering just how talented and brilliant Leonardo da Vinci was. Architects and civil engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used a 3D printer to create a replica of a bridge da Vinci designed, but never built. To their surprise, not only did it work, but it would have also revolutionized bridge design five centuries ago.

As the story goes, in 1502 A.D. the Sultan Bayezid II wanted to build a bridge to connect the city of Istanbul to its neighbor, Galata. One of the proposed designs came from Leonardo da Vinci, who had already made a name for himself in the arts and sciences at the time. In a letter he sent to the sultan, accompanied by a notebook full of sketches, da Vinci described a bridge that would span the proposed distance using a single, flattened arch design, supported by bases on either shore. Bridges at the time were typically made using a series of semicircular arches, and to span the distance between the two cities would have required at least 10 evenly spaced piers in between to support the entire structure. Da Vinci’s design, which would have easily allowed sailboats to pass beneath it, was radically different (and centuries ahead of its time), which is probably why the sultan decided not to take the risk. Half a millennium later, researchers were curious if it would have succeeded.

The original notes and illustrations describing the bridge didn’t specify what materials would be used to build it, or how it would actually be constructed. But the MIT researchers concluded that the only material that would have provided adequate strength was stone, and based on the building techniques commonly employed around the same time da Vinci came up with this design, the bridge would have probably been engineered to rely on gravity to hold all of its pieces together.

To test their assumptions, the team at MIT created a 1:500-scale replica, measuring about 32 inches long, that would be assembled from 126 blocks of varying shapes and sizes, created by a 3D printer. The real bridge, had it actually been built, would have required thousands of precisely chiseled stone blocks for its assembly, but the approach MIT took for the replica still allowed them to properly test the feasibility of its design.

Not only did the bridge work, remaining strong and stable without the use of any mortars or fasteners, but the team at MIT also realized that da Vinci had even engineered a way to minimize unwanted lateral movements in the structure, which would have quickly led to its collapse. The footings on either side of the arched bridge featured designs that splayed outwards to add a considerable amount of stability. The bridge would have even survived most earthquakes, which were common at the time in that area, as the MIT researchers discovered by putting their replica on two movable platforms. It wasn’t indestructible, but it would have been an ancient architectural marvel.

via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com

October 10, 2019 at 09:27AM

Steam’s Remote Play Together brings any local multiplayer game online

https://www.engadget.com/2019/10/10/steams-remote-play-together-brings-any-local-multiplayer-game-o/

Steam is set to offer a new feature that’ll make multiplayer games a more communal experience. Called "Remote Play Together," the feature is designed for shared-screen and split-screen games — it streams your screen to a friend while capturing their input and streaming it back to you. As Valve’s Alden Kroll says, "You are both playing the same game, looking at the same thing." So it’s like playing together in the same room, without being in the same room.

The announcement was made on the Steamworks website — which only devs have access to — but said that Remote Play Together will enter Steam beta the week of October 21st, and that all local multiplayer, local co-op and split-screen games will be automatically included in the beta.

Via: PC Gamer

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

October 10, 2019 at 07:36AM

NASA is Building its First Electric Airplane

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/?p=39409

NASA’s X-57 Maxwell is the agency’s first all-electric airplane. It’s also the first X-plane for NASA in two decades. (Credit: NASA)
NASA is getting ready to test their first all-electric
plane, the X-57 Maxwell, at the Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards,
California.
This latest version of the aircraft, called Modification II
or Mod II, just arrived at Edwards from San Luis Obispo, California, where the
plane was being developed by Empirical Systems Aerospace.
Electric Air

via Discover Main Feed https://ift.tt/1dqgCKa

October 9, 2019 at 06:09PM