Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Amazon will shut down its food delivery business in India by the end of the year, the retailer said Friday, retreating from a $20 billion vertical it entered less than three years ago.

The retailer will shut down the food delivery business, called Amazon Food, on December 29 in India. It launched Food in India in May 2020 in parts of Bengaluru. The company later expanded the service across the city, tying up with additional restaurants, but it never heavily promoted or marketed the platform.

“Customers have been telling us for some time that they would like to order prepared meals on Amazon in addition to shopping for all other essentials. This is particularly relevant in present times as they stay home safe,” the company said at the time of Food launch.

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On September 14, 1956, IBM announced the 305 and 650 RAMAC (Random Access Memory Accounting) “data processing machines,” incorporating the first-ever disk storage product. The 305 came with fifty 24-inch disks for a total capacity of 5 megabytes, weighed 1 ton, and could be leased for $3,200 per month.

In 1953, Arthur J. Critchlow, a young member of IBM’s advanced technologies research lab in San Jose, California, was assigned the task of finding a better data storage medium than punch-cards.

The information explosion (a term first used in 1941, according to the Oxford English Dictionary) has turned into the big digital data explosion. And the data explosion enabled deep learning, an advanced data analysis method, to perform today’s AI breakthroughs in image identification and natural language processing.

The RAMAC became obsolete within a few years of its introduction as the vacuum tubes powering it were replaced by transistors. Today, disk drives still serve as the primary containers for digital data, but solid-state drives (flash memory), first used in mobile devices, are fast replacing disk drives even in today’s successors of the RAMAC, supporting large-scale business operations.

Whatever form the storage takes, IBM created in 1956 new markets and businesses based on fast access to digital data. As Seagate’s Mark Kryder asserted in 2006: “Instead of Silicon Valley, they should call it Ferrous Oxide Valley. It wasn’t the microprocessor that enabled the personal video recorder, it was storage. It’s enabling new industries.”

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The story of the damage done to the world’s biodiversity is a tale of decline spanning thousands of years. Can the world seize its chance to change the narrative?

The story of the biodiversity crisis starts with a cold-case murder mystery that is tens of thousands of years old. When humans started spreading across the globe they discovered a world full of huge, mythical-sounding mammals called “megafauna”, but by the end of the Pleistocene, one by one, these large animals had disappeared. There is no smoking gun and evidence from ancient crime scenes is — unsurprisingly — patchy. But what investigators have learned suggests a prime suspect: humans.

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Every year, the EU generates over 2.5 billion tonnes of waste – that’s 5 tonnes per person. The good news is that much of this waste can be recycled and reused. The bad news, however, is that doing so requires proper collection processes, which is often easier said than done.

“The challenge with waste collection is that it is a widely dispersed process,” says Tjerk Wardenaar, a consultant at EGEN, part of the PNO Group, the project’s lead partner. “Individual consumers discard small amounts of waste, local and regional authorities implement collection systems, waste management companies do the actual collecting, recycling companies recover materials, and so on.”

With the support of the EU-funded COLLECTORS project, Wardenaar aims to increase our understanding of how these various steps relate to one another. “Waste collection depends on a combination of social and technical factors,” he explains. “Our goal is to identify best practices that decision makers can use to implement an integrated waste collection system that supports Europe’s transition to a waste-free, circular economy.”

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