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Category: transportation – Page 512

Clean power is shaking up the global geopolitics of energy

This special report will look at the energy transition from the perspective of America, the EU and China as well as petrostates such as Russia and Saudi Arabia. It will pinpoint winners and losers. It will argue that America is at risk of squandering an early lead, obtained by using natural gas and renewables to slash emissions, promoting clean technology and helping pioneer the Paris agreement. China is catching up fast. Saudi Arabia and Russia are in most obvious peril.

TO ENTER TAFT, two hours north of Los Angeles, you drive along the “Petroleum Highway”, past miles of billboards advertising Jesus. God’s country is also oil country. Spread over the sagebrush hills surrounding the town are thousands of steel pumpjacks (pictured), contraptions that suck oil out of the ground. They look like a herd of dinosaurs. Some Californians would describe the oil industry in the same way.

The oil produced at Taft is not produced by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, as much of it is in Texas and North Dakota. It is so heavy it needs to be steamed out of the ground, in a process known locally as “huff and puff”. Yet Kern County, with Taft on its western edge, produces 144m barrels of oil a year, the second highest output of any county in America. Fred Holmes, a third-generation oilman and patron of the West Kern Oil Museum, says he is proud of the heritage, however much it irks local drivers of electric Tesla cars that the Golden State has such a carbon-heavy underbelly. “Oil is renewable energy. It just takes longer to renew,” he quips. He has built a giant wooden derrick at the museum to celebrate it.

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Next Generation Launcher considered under U.S. Air Force’s EELV program

The U.S. Air Force is considering Orbital ATK’s Next Generation Launcher under its Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program. What does this new launch vehicle look like? How tall will it be? What will it capable of? To find the answers to these questions, SpaceFlight Insider spoke with one of the officials responsible for the new booster’s development.

SpaceFlight Insider spoke to Orbital ATK’s Mark Pieczynski, the Dulles, Virginia-based company’s vice-president of Business Development for Orbital ATK’s Flight Systems Group.

SFI: Thanks for taking the time to talk to us about NGL’s inclusion in the USAF’s Evolved Expendable Vehicle program. Can you provide our readers with a bit of background about you company’s latest offering.

The limits of earthquake early warning: Timeliness of ground motion estimates

The basic physics of earthquakes is such that strong ground motion cannot be expected from an earthquake unless the earthquake itself is very close or has grown to be very large. We use simple seismological relationships to calculate the minimum time that must elapse before such ground motion can be expected at a distance from the earthquake, assuming that the earthquake magnitude is not predictable. Earthquake early warning (EEW) systems are in operation or development for many regions around the world, with the goal of providing enough warning of incoming ground shaking to allow people and automated systems to take protective actions to mitigate losses. However, the question of how much warning time is physically possible for specified levels of ground motion has not been addressed. We consider a zero-latency EEW system to determine possible warning times a user could receive in an ideal case. In this case, the only limitation on warning time is the time required for the earthquake to evolve and the time for strong ground motion to arrive at a user’s location. We find that users who wish to be alerted at lower ground motion thresholds will receive more robust warnings with longer average warning times than users who receive warnings for higher ground motion thresholds. EEW systems have the greatest potential benefit for users willing to take action at relatively low ground motion thresholds, whereas users who set relatively high thresholds for taking action are less likely to receive timely and actionable information.

Earthquake early warning (EEW) systems rapidly detect and characterize ongoing earthquakes in real time to provide advance warnings of impending ground motion. They use the information contained in the early parts of the typically low-amplitude ground motion waveforms to estimate the ensuing and potentially large-amplitude ground motion. Because EEW alert information can be transmitted faster than seismic wave propagation speed, such ground motion warnings may arrive at a target site before the strong shaking itself, thereby providing invaluable time for both people and automated systems to take actions to mitigate earthquake-related injury and losses. These actions might range from simple procedures like warning people to get themselves to a safe location to complex automated procedures like halting airport takeoffs and landings.

Transhumanism Is Complicating the Sometimes Antagonistic Faith vs. Science Dynamic

Millenials grew up under the technological halo of Moore’s law, enjoying booming exponential growth of computation power that ushered in the information age. It should come as no surprise that transhumanism has earned a degree of mainstream acceptance—from Hollywood movies to magazine covers and the latest sci-fi TV. Transhumanist beliefs will continue to permeate culture as long as the promise of technological progress holds its end of the bargain.

For transhumanist faiths, technology becomes a way of cashing checks religion helped write.

For instance, Silicon Valley engineer Anthony Levandowski—whom you may know from the Uber-Waymo lawsuit over self-driving car technology—recently launched the Way of the Future Church, a new religious organization based on developing godlike artificial intelligence. On its website, the Way of the Future states, “We believe the creation of ‘super intelligence’ is inevitable,” and according to IRS documents detailed by Wired, this new religion seeks “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software.” This exuberance departs from the cautious stance toward A.I. taken by Hawking, Musk, and others who warn that artificial superintelligence could pose an existential threat. However, regardless of whether artificial superintelligence is seen as an angel or a demon, Hawking, Musk, and A.I. evangelists alike share the common belief that this technology should be taken seriously.

US-Russian crew to blast off for International Space Station mission

A handout photo made available by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) shows the Soyuz rocket inside Building 112 prior to being rolled out by train to the launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, March 19, 2018. Expedition 55 crewmembers Ricky Arnold and Drew Feustel of NASA and Oleg Artemyev of Roscosmos are scheduled to launch at 1:44 p.m. Eastern time (11:44 p.m. Baikonur time) on March 21 and will spend the next five months living and working aboard the International Space Station (ISS), NASA said.

Uber patent application discusses intention signaling system

Reaching the highest levels of safety for self-driving cars will depend on how well the cars are engineered to know when communications are needed, and to be able to communicate with other cars, with bikes, with people on foot. Where to go? When to walk?

Uber Technologies has filed a patent toward that end, with a discussion on how might communicate with pedestrians.

The patent title is “Light output system for a .” The patent applicant is Uber Technologies.

Elon Musk Has Plans To Disrupt At Least Eight Established Industries

In this modern day David and Goliath battle (multiplied by eight), one man is trying to take down a bevy of behemoth industries. CB Insights reports, “Elon Musk thinks and acts on a larger, more cosmic scale than we’re accustomed to… His main projects take on almost every major industry and global problem conceivable, and imagine a disruptive fundamental rewiring of that space or sector.”

*This article comes to us courtesy of EVANNEX (which also makes aftermarket Tesla accessories). Authored by Matt Pressman.

So which sectors are on Musk’s hit list? CB Insights looks at: “8 different industries where Musk and his companies operate to understand how they have begun to change,” transform and mold them into Musk’s futuristic vision. Digital Journal provides a top-line recap highlighting the scope and breadth of what Elon Musk is attempting…

Real people are now hailing Waymo’s robotic taxis, without a driver in sight

The future arrived, and it’s a minivan. Waymo’s fleet of totally driverless cars in Phoenix, Arizona, now lets members of the public hail a ride around the suburbs.

The news: Waymo’s CEO, John Krafick, announced at SXSW in Austin, Texas, that the firm is offering trips to so-called “early riders”—the first people to have signed up to use its robotic Chrysler Pacifica taxis. The minivans don’t have a safety driver behind the wheel, but someone can take control remotely if necessary.

Why it matters: The cars have been in testing without a safety driver for a few months. But this long-awaited advance is the first time people have been able to simply hail a totally driver-free ride using an app, as they would an Uber. It’s a big moment for a firm that hopes to turn its autonomy tech into a viable business by offering driverless rides.

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