The Military Wants Robots That Can Explore Tunnels Barely Large Enough to Fit a Human

Posted on by

UNDERSCAPE

The U.S. military’s research agency wants help navigating the subterranean world. And since it doesn’t look like a ragtag team of sewer-dwelling mutant turtles will be enlisting in the armed forces any time soon, the agency is turning to the next best option: engineers.

Last week, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced six teams of roboticists that will compete in its Subterranean Challenge, a multi-year competition with $2.75 million up for grabs. Each team will receive funding to create robots that can map, navigate, and search complex underground environments, such as man-made tunnels, natural cave systems, and subterranean urban infrastructure.

TWO TRACKS

The teams can choose to compete in just one of two tracks — systems or virtual — or both.

For the systems track, a team will create robots it can demonstrate on a physical course. Some of the spaces on this course may be barely large enough for a human to navigate, while others could be big enough for an all-terrain vehicle.

For the virtual track, a team will need to create the software for subterranean robots and demonstrate it in a simulated environment boasting a wider range of scenarios than in the physical tests.

DEEP UNDERGROUND

In any case, the teams must be ready to compete in the first of DARPA’s tests in the fall of 2019. After a final competition in the fall of 2021, DARPA will award the winner of the systems track $2 million and the winner of the virtual track $750,000. The competition’s judges will place a premium on autonomy, since communicating with robots while they’re deep underground can be difficult.

Perhaps more important than earning the big payout, though, these teams of roboticists could help the military save lives if the U.S. ever finds itself in a situation like the daring rescue of children from a Thai cave earlier this year. We’d like to see mutant turtles manage that.

READ MORE: Modular Robots Being Developed to Navigate Tunnels and Caves [The Engineer]

More on cave rescues: Elon Musk Is Sending a Team of Engineers to Help Rescue Trapped Thai Boys

See the rest here:
The Military Wants Robots That Can Explore Tunnels Barely Large Enough to Fit a Human

The Stuff in IKEA’s Biodegradable Packaging Will Now Make Tasty Lab-Grown Meats

Posted on by

MATERIAL LIFE

Ecovative, the startup that makes biodegradable packaging for furniture seller IKEA, says that the same mushroom roots it uses to pack up tables and chairs could be used to create the next generation of delicious lab-grown meats.

“This is the next natural step in this evolution to use natural products to make things,” said co-founder Eben Bayer, in an interview with Business Insider.

MARBLED MEATS

The problem Ecovative wants to solve, Bayer told Business Insider, is that while many lab-grown meat startups have succeeded in growing individual cells from livestock into sausages and burgers, they’ve struggled to recreate the complex anatomy of a chicken breast or a fatty steak.

That’s where Bayer thinks his company’s mycelium, or mushroom roots, could help. Using a formula similar to the mixture of mycelium and discarded farm materials it’s turned into green packaging for IKEA and Dell, he said that Ecovative has created a “scaffold” that lets meat cells grow into ropes of muscle and layers of succulent fat.

FUTURE FARM

The carbon emissions of farm-grown meat are colossal. A tasty lab-grown meat with a low carbon footprint could be a game changer — not just for your dinner plate, but for the future of the planet.

Bayer didn’t say whether his company has locked down any industry partners, like Memphis Meats or New Age Meats. Unless Ecovative plans to market its own fake meat, that’ll be a key step to getting their food into hungry mouths.

READ MORE: A startup that turns mushrooms into IKEA packaging wants to become the backbone of the lab-grown meat industry [Business Insider]

More on lab-grown meat: Companies Are Betting on Lab-Grown Meat, but None Know How to Get You to Eat It

Continue reading here:
The Stuff in IKEA’s Biodegradable Packaging Will Now Make Tasty Lab-Grown Meats

Traveling to Mars Could Cause Life-Threatening Damage to Astronauts’ Guts, Says Study

Posted on by

DEADLY RAYS

Getting humans to Mars could cost upwards of $1 trillion. But for the astronauts making the journey, the cost could be even higher — they might pay with their lives.

According to a new NASA-funded study conducted by researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center, exposure to galactic cosmic radiation during a trip to Mars could leave astronauts with permanent and potentially deadly damage to their gastrointestinal tissue.

RUINOUS RADIATION

On Earth and in its orbit, people and animals are protected from certain types of cosmic radiation by the planet’s magnetic field. For their study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers attempted to simulate the conditions found in deep space by blasting 10 male mice with doses of heavy ion radiation — the equivalent, they said, of what a human astronaut would be exposed to on a deep space journey that lasted several months.

The researchers then euthanized the mice and studied samples of their intestinal tissue. They found that the guts of irradiated mice hadn’t been absorbing nutrients properly, and had formed cancerous polyps. Even worse, the damage appears to be permanent — mice killed and dissected after a year still hadn’t recovered.

A GIANT LEAP

The findings are alarming because we don’t yet have a way to protect astronauts from cosmic radiation.

“With the current shielding technology, it is difficult to protect astronauts from the adverse effects of heavy ion radiation,” said researcher Kamal Datta in a press release. “Although there may be a way to use medicines to counter these effects, no such agent has been developed yet,”

Of course, mice aren’t the same as humans, so the actual effect of radiation on astronauts is still largely unknown. However, if we ever hope to send humans to Mars and beyond, nailing down the effects of deep space on astronaut health will need to be a top priority.

READ MORE: Animal Study Suggests Deep Space Travel May Significantly Damage GI Function in Astronauts [Georgetown University]

More on astronaut health: Traveling to Mars Will Blast Astronauts With Deadly Cosmic Radiation, New Data Shows

Originally posted here:
Traveling to Mars Could Cause Life-Threatening Damage to Astronauts’ Guts, Says Study

Google Used Its Most Sophisticated AI yet to Create Pictures of Burgers

Posted on by

DON’T PROGRAM WHEN YOU’RE HUNGRY

Artificial intelligence and human intelligence aren’t the same, to be sure. But it seems we have one big thing in common: we spend our time fantasizing about dinner.

In a research paper published Friday in the preprint server arXiv, a team of AI researchers from Google DeepMind teamed up with a scientist from Heriot-Watt University to develop what they’re calling the largest, most advanced Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) ever. And to prove that it works better than any other, they had it create photorealistic images of landscapes, (very) good dogs and other animals, and of course some hot, juicy burgers.

WHAT’S THE BEEF

Generative Adversarial Networks are one of the more sophisticated types of AI algorithms out there. In short, one network creates something — in this case an image — as realistically as possible. Meanwhile, another network checks its work against examples of the real deal. This back and forth makes the two networks gradually improve to the point where the latter system is really good at detecting AI-generated images but the other is still able to fool it.

GANs are generally used to create media, whether its a new level of a video game or 3D models. And though their ability to fool us and themselves presents a bit of a double-edged sword, their ability to discriminate algorithmic from human output can be used to find and fight misleading deepfakes.

This process is what allowed DeepMind’s burger-cooking GAN to go from creating, as Quartz reported, a weird, beefy blob in 2016 to what actually looks like an appetizing (albeit overcooked) slab of burg today.

ALTERNATIVE PROTEIN

Some argue that we need to move away from red meat, but AI isn’t ready to join us yet. While the burger-generating algorithm is in great shape, others aren’t quite there. For instance, the twists and turns of brass tubing that make up a French horn baffled the network. The butterfly image is just a little off, and any attempt to render a photo of a human results in a horrifying blob monster.

READ MORE: In just two years, AI has managed to make a slightly more appetizing cheeseburger [Quartz]

More on GANs: If DARPA Wants To Stop Deepfakes, They Should Talk To Facebook And Google

Follow this link:
Google Used Its Most Sophisticated AI yet to Create Pictures of Burgers

The UK Government Is Planning to Regulate Hate Speech Online

Posted on by

It’s an ugly reality we see in every corner of the web: racism, bigotry, misogyny, political extremism. Hate speech seems to thrive on the internet like a cancer.

It persists and flourishes on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit — they certainly don’t claim to welcome it, but they’re having a hell of a time keeping it in check. No AI is yet sophisticated enough to flag all hate speech perfectly, so human moderators have to join the robots in the trenches. It’s an imperfect, time-consuming process.

As social media sites come under increasing scrutiny to root out their hate speech problem, they also come up against limits for how much they can (or will) do. So whose responsibility is it, anyway, to mediate hate speech? Is it up to online platforms themselves, or should the government intervene?

The British government seems to think the answer is both. The Home Office and the Department of Digital, Culture, Media, and Sports (DCMS) — a department responsible for regulating broadcasting and the internet — is drafting plans for regulation that would make platforms like Facebook and Twitter legally responsible for all the content they host, according to Buzzfeed News.

In a statement to Futurism, the DCMS says that it has “primarily encouraged internet companies to take action on a voluntary basis.” But progress has been too slow — and that’s why it plans to intervene with “statutory intervention.”

But is this kind of government intervention really the right way forward when it comes to hate speech online? Experts aren’t convinced it is. In fact, some think it may even do more harm than good.

Details on about DCMS’ plan are scant — it’s still early in development. What we do know so far is that the legislation, Buzzfeed reports, would have two parts. One: it would introduce “take down times” — timeframes within which online platforms have to take down hate speech, or face fines. Two: it would standardize age verification for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram users. A white paper detailing these plans will allegedly be published later this year.

Why should the government intervene at all? Internet platforms are already trying to limit hate speech on their own. Facebook removed more than 2.5 million pieces of hate speech and “violent content” in the first quarter of 2018 alone, according to a Facebook blog post published back in May.

Indeed, these platforms have been dealing with hate speech for as long as they’ve existed. “There’s nothing new about hate speech on online platforms,” says Brett Frischmann, a professor in Law, Business and Economics at Villanova University. The British government might be trying to put in a law to stop hate speech too quickly to come up with anything that will work the way it’s supposed to.

Unfortunately, hate speech is a whack-a-mole that moves far faster than publishers seem to be able to. As a result, a lot of it goes unmediated. For instance, hate speech from far right extremist groups in the U.K. often still falls through the cracks, fueling xenophobic beliefs. In extreme cases, that kind of hate speech can lead to physical violence and the radicalization of impressionable minds on the internet.

Image Credit: Pathum Danthanarayana

Jim Killock, executive director for the Open Rights Group in the U.K. — a non-profit committed to preserving and promoting citizens’ rights on the internet — thinks the legislation, were it to pass tomorrow, wouldn’t be just ineffective. It might even prove to be counterproductive.

The rampant hate speech online, Killock believes, is symptomatic of a much larger problem. “In some ways, Facebook is a mirror of our society,” he says. “This tidal wave of unpleasantness, like racism and many other things, has come on the back of [feeling] disquiet about powerlessness in society, people wanting someone to blame.”

Unfortunately, that kind of disillusionment with society won’t change overnight. But when a policy only addresses the symptoms of systemic injustice instead of the actual issues, the government is making a mistake. By censoring those who feel like they are being censored, the government is reinforcing their beliefs. And that’s not a good sign, especially when those who are being censored are actively spreading hate speech online themselves.

Plus, a law like the one DCMS has proposed would effectively make certain kinds of speech illegal, even if that’s not what the law says. Killock argues that while a lot of online material may be “unpleasant,” it often doesn’t violate any laws. And it shouldn’t be to companies to decide where the line between the two lies, he adds. “If people are breaking the law, it frankly is the job of courts to set those boundaries.”

But there’s good reason to avoid redrawing those legal boundaries for what kind of behavior online should be enforced (even if it is technically not illegal). The government might have to adjust much wider sweeping common law that concerns the freedom of speech. That is probably not going to happen.

The UK government’s plans are still in the development stage, but there are already plenty of reasons to be skeptical that the law would do what the government intends. Muddying the boundaries between illegal and non-illegal behavior online sets a dangerous precedent, and that could have some undesirable consequences — like wrongfully flagging satirical content as hate speech for instance.

The DCMS is setting itself up for failure: censoring content online will only embolden its critics, while failing to address the root issues. It has to find that middle ground if it wants a real shot: too much censorship, and the mistrust of those who feel marginalized will keep building. Too little regulation, and internet platforms will continue to make many users feel unwelcome or lead to violence.

The U.K. government has a few tactics it could try before it decides to regulate speech online. The government could incentivize companies to strengthen the appeal process for taking down harmful content. “If you make it really hard for people to use appeals, they may not use them at all,” Killock argues. For instance, the government could introduce legislation that would ensure each user has a standardized way of reporting problematic content online.

But it will take a much bigger shift before we are able to get rid of hate speech in a meaningful way. “Blaming Facebook or the horrendous people and opinions that exist in society is perhaps a little unfair,” Killock says. “If people really want to do and say these [hurtful] things, they will do it. And if you want them to stop, you have to persuade them that it’s a bad idea.”

What do those policies look like? Killock doesn’t have the answer yet. “The question we have really is, how do we make society feel better about itself?” says Killock. “And I’m not pretending that that’s a small thing at all.”

More on regulating speech online: Social Media Giants Need Regulation From a Government That’s Unsure How To Help

Continue reading here:
The UK Government Is Planning to Regulate Hate Speech Online

A Nonprofit Plans to Store Human Knowledge in DNA and Store It on the Moon

Posted on by

MOON UNIT

Imagine, for a second, that human life has been snuffed out like the flame of a candle. Wouldn’t it be nice if we’d archived the sum of our knowledge for whoever might come along next?

That’s the idea behind the Arch Mission Foundation, a nonprofit exploring ways to store vast amounts of information. in formats that will last for “thousands to millions” of years. And after all, spreading caches of information around the solar system is the ultimate backup.

Its latest project: encoding important books and crowdsourced images into synthetic DNA molecules, and storing them on the Moon.

DNA INFO

To tackle the DNA project, Arch Mission is collaborating with Microsoft, the University of Washington, and the Twist Bioscience Corporation. The collaborators chose DNA, they wrote in a press release, because it can store information in an ultra-compact form.

“Using DNA as a building block you can write and store information in an extremely small volume,” said Arch Mission co-founder Nova Spivack in an interview with Scientific American. “A tiny liquid droplet could contain Amazon’s entire data center. You can then replicate it inexpensively to create literally billions of copies.”

LONG TERM

Once they’ve stored the data in the DNA — which will include 20 books selected by Project Gutenberg and 10,000 crowdsourced images of everyday life — the plan is to send it to the Moon on an Atlas V rocket in 2020, according to Scientific American. 

The Moon project is just an early step in Arch Mission’s very ambitious plans, which include building a vast repository of human knowledge and placing copies on planets, asteroids, comets, and moons around the solar system.

It’s not clear, Spivack acknowledged in the Scientific American interview, how likely it is that future life forms would ever actually stumble across one of those archives. But the project, he argued, is also a “grand gesture that brings together our hopes and dreams about becoming a spacefaring civilization.”

READ MORE: Lunar library to include photos, books stored in DNA [University of Washington]

More on the Moon: Why Are We Going to the Moon, Again? Oh Right, to Make It a “Gas Station for Outer Space”

Here is the original post:
A Nonprofit Plans to Store Human Knowledge in DNA and Store It on the Moon

Don’t Want to Receive That Presidential Text Alert Today? Here’s How to Avoid It

Posted on by

At 2:18 PM Eastern Time on Wednesday, every cell phone in America will buzz, beep, or maybe play a jaunty tune. Everyone will receive a special, handy-dandy emergency broadcast sent by the White House.

The test of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System, which was supposed to happen in September but was pushed back, will join the ranks of Amber Alerts for missing children and those flash flood warnings that you only seem to get on sunny days — yet another thing that makes your pocket buzz but typically doesn’t affect your day-to-day life all that much.

Granted, these alerts are actually from FEMA and are intended to warn us about natural disasters, cyberattacks, and acts of war (they are at the directive of the president but they don’t actually contain a message from President Trump). But the audacity of the federal government to contact us in a way that is so personal and immediate — let alone all of us at once — has left many wondering how to opt out.

The consensus among media reports, such as in WIRED’s oral history of the alert, is that we’re SOL.

But we’re not giving up. Here are the top three strategies we’ve come up with to stop your phone from buzzing on cue for today’s emergency alert.

ASK YOUR PHONE NICELY

If you go to your phone’s settings menu, you’ll have a number of ways to limit the notifications that your phone sends your way. On a Droid, you’ll find an Emergency Alerts app that you can’t disable or uninstall, but you can hit the “force stop” button. Note that the app will start back up after a few minutes, so your best bet will be to strategically time the force stop before 2:18.

On an iPhone, you can turn off “government alerts” in your notifications settings, but that may be just as useless as hitting the “close doors” button on an elevator.

More extreme measures might be in order.

TURN YOUR PHONE OFF FOREVER

You can’t get the message if you’ve got nothing to receive it on, right? We’re betting that turning your phone back on at 2:19 will just delay rather than cancel the alert, so you really need to commit to this one. And if you want to avoid accidentally turning your phone back on in your pocket, we have one more idea.

HAMMER

Use a hammer.

Image from Pixabay

More here:
Don’t Want to Receive That Presidential Text Alert Today? Here’s How to Avoid It

We Just Learned Something New About “One of the Weirdest Objects in the Milky Way”

Posted on by

STAR POWER

The star system SS 433 is something of a celebrity in the world of astronomy.

It’s the first known example of a microquasar — a black hole that feeds off a nearby companion star and emits two powerful jets of material. Plus, at just 15,000 light-years away, it’s relatively close to us.

And now, an international team of researchers has discovered something new about SS 433: it emits a type of electromagnetic radiation known as high-energy gamma rays. This new insight could help astronomers understand what’s going on at the centers of galaxies, where huge quasars sometimes feed on many stars at once.

DARK WATER

The team discovered the rays using the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Gamma-Ray Observatory (HAWC) in Mexico.

HAWC features more than 300 water tanks, each about 24 feet across. When gamma rays reach Earth’s atmosphere from elsewhere in the universe, they cause showers of particles that hit the water in these tanks, causing shockwaves of light. Special cameras detect these, and from their recordings, researchers can pinpoint the source of the gamma rays.

For their study, published Wednesday in Nature, the team examined 1,017 days’ worth of HAWC data and determined that SS 433 was a source of gamma rays. Perhaps even more remarkably, they figured out that the rays were coming from the ends of the microquasars’ jets — a source of gamma rays they’d never seen before.

CLOSER LOOK

“This new observation of high-energy gamma rays builds on almost 40 years of measurements of one of the weirdest objects in the Milky Way,” said study co-author Segev BenZvi in an emailed press release. “Every measurement gives us a different piece of the puzzle, and we hope to use our knowledge to learn about the quasar family as a whole.”

Of the roughly one dozen microquasars in the Milky Way, only two appear to emit high-energy gamma rays. The fact that the closest microquasar to Earth also emits these rays — and in a previously unknown way — could afford researchers a better way to study them, all while helping us get to know our favorite microquasar a little bit better.

READ MORE: Very-High-Energy Particle Acceleration Powered by the Jets of the Microquasar SS 433 [Nature]

More on HAWC: Earth Is Getting Hit by Too Much Antimatter, and Nobody Knows Why

Original post:
We Just Learned Something New About “One of the Weirdest Objects in the Milky Way”

Tesla Seems to Be Producing Plenty of Cars. They Just Aren’t Ending up on the Road.

Posted on by

SURPRISING SURPLUS

At one point, it seemed like Tesla Model 3s were more in demand than tickets to a hypothetical Coachella co-headlined by the newly reunited Jay-Z and Kanye.

An estimated 500,000 people pre-ordered one of the $35,000 vehicles. In an effort to make all those cars, Tesla had to resort to moving assembly into a tent. A used Model 3 was even (briefly) listed for sale online, marked up to $150,000.

So the Model 3 is in demand — right? So why are hundreds of Teslas now sitting dormant in parking lots across the nation?

EYES IN THE SKIES

The New York Times reports that a group calling itself the Shorty Air Force — that’s “shorty” as in “short selling” — has shared photos of large numbers of seemingly unsold Model 3s and other Teslas, parked together in lots and garages across the U.S. According to the Times, at least some of the members of the group think the stashed cars are evidence that Tesla is hiding poor sales.

Some of the photos, which the anonymous members of the Shorty Air Force take using drones and airplanes, feature hundreds of the vehicles, while others feature just a few dozen.

SUPPLY AND DEMAND

That’s not the only explanation for why these cars are simply chilling in lots while drivers who pre-ordered Model 3s beg Elon Musk on Twitter to deliver their vehicles.

The company could be running low on delivery trailers, as Musk told one Twitter user. Maybe the photographed cars are in need of repairs before Tesla can deliver them to drivers — at least one photo showed a Tesla with a needed repair spelled out on its windshield. Or, you know, maybe the demand for Teslas simply isn’t as high as it seemed.

We may want to know the answer to the mystery of the extra Teslas even more than we want to know what changed Musk’s mind about settling that SEC lawsuit. And that’s something we really want to know.

READ MORE: Unraveling a Tesla Mystery: Lots (and Lots) of Parked Cars [The New York Times]

More on Tesla: A Used Tesla Model 3 Was Briefly Listed for $150,000

See the rest here:
Tesla Seems to Be Producing Plenty of Cars. They Just Aren’t Ending up on the Road.

The FDA Just Raided the Headquarters of E-Cigarette Maker JUUL

Posted on by

VAPORIZED

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) just raided the headquarters of popular e-cigarette maker JUUL Labs in San-Francisco.

It seized thousands of pages of documents about the vape maker’s sales and marketing strategies, according to the Wall Street Journal. The raid comes on the tail of a huge effort by the agency to stop e-cigarette makers from marketing to minors.

PRECIOUS JUULS

The FDA has been on Juul’s case since April 2018, telling it off for targeting users under the age of 21. Earlier this month, the agency gave Juul 60 days to get its act together.

Juul holds considerable power in the e-cigarette market. According to a recent Wells Fargo analysis as reported by CNBC, Juul’s sales skyrocketed 783 percent in just one year; experts estimate the company controls 68 percent of the e-cigarette market, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The FDA got interested because adolescents are such huge fans. The National Institute on Drug Abuse found that 7 in 10 teens are exposed to e-cig ads. Even the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have reported that vaping’s popularity has taken off among teens.

COUGHING FIT

The jury is still out whether using e-cigarettes is bad for your health, especially for teens who weren’t smokers before. Vaping was found to leave toxic chemicals in the lungs. But there’s a lot we don’t know yet.

The unfortunate reality: teens do what they want, but they often don’t know what’s good or bad for them, either. It’s time for us to do a better job at parenting them, parents and governing bodies alike.

READ MORE: FDA Raids Vape Maker Juul, Seizes ‘Thousands’ of Documents [Gizmodo]

More on e-cigarettes: The FDA Just Threatened to Crack Down on E-Cig Companies Like Juul

Continue reading here:
The FDA Just Raided the Headquarters of E-Cigarette Maker JUUL

You Can Now Pick Your Baby’s Eye Color Before You’re Even Pregnant

Posted on by

Cheat Sheet

When you were in grade school, you likely encountered Punnett squares, which are simple charts that let you figure out the likelihood a child will inherit certain traits from their parents. Maybe you even entered your own parents’ eye colors into one, noting that you were likely to inherit your father’s brown peepers over your mother’s blue ones because his gene variants were dominant over hers.

Now a fertility clinic in California is letting would-be parents use the same technique — plus some modern genetic screening tech — to choose the color of their future baby’s eyes.

Behind Blue Eyes

According to a Wall Street Journal report, the Fertility Institutes clinic employs the same technology used to test embryos for genetic diseases to screen them for eye color. Parents can then choose to move forward with implantation of only the embryos most likely to produce an offspring with the eye color of their choice.

Of course, if the parents come from a long line of brown-eyed folks, this test won’t magically allow the duo to produce an embryo with blue eyes. But if the couple has, say, a one-in-six shot at the rare eye color, they could test several embryos until they found one that fit the bill.

Babies By Design

Choosing an unborn child’s eye color is a moral gray area that could lead to other eugenics-adjacent practices. Today a clinic might offer parents a choice of eye colors, but tomorrow, they could have the ability to screen embryos for hair color, height, intelligence, and a host of other traits.

And deciding as a society whether creating these “designer babies” is ethical will take much more effort than you’ll likely expend in a grade school science class.

READ MORE: Is It Ethical to Choose Your Baby’s Eye Color? [The Wall Street Journal]

More on designer babies: Creating Genetically Modified Babies Is “Morally Permissible,” Says Ethics Committee

See the original post:
You Can Now Pick Your Baby’s Eye Color Before You’re Even Pregnant

4 Reasons Why Amazon Workers Might Have Gotten a Raise

Posted on by

Amazon is the second largest employer in the United States. Its CEO just overtook Bill Gates as the richest man on the planet.

It’s hard to square that reality with the working conditions of the 575,000 Americans Amazon employs. Reports claim employees have to pee in bottles to keep up with the relentless pace at Amazon’s factories. The Economist found that Amazon warehouses openings actually caused the wages to drop at other warehouses in the same regions.

But the days of sub-par working conditions are behind us, right? On Monday, the online retailer announced it would raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour for some 250,000 workers. It’s not a fluke: some of those employees will see significant boosts in income. Amazon is even announcing it will advocate for a higher minimum wage on a federal level in Congress.

But what drove the company to announce this now? 

Compensating Amazon workers fairly is an inherently good thing, but the timing of such an announcement is a little suspect.

Amazon might have agreed to the age hike:

1. Because Bezos Actually Cares

You can bet that Amazon didn’t get to its #324 rank on Forbes’ America’s Best Employers list by offering outstanding benefits that cost the company. But maybe Bezos has a heart, after all. What brand would want to be associated with atrocious working conditions?

2. To Prevent Competitors from Poaching Workers

Here’s one for the skeptics out there: maybe raising the minimum wage of Amazon workers was a play to keep employees from working for smaller competitors, or even steal workers from smaller competitors, as an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal suggests.

To take the argument further, lobbying Congress to raise the national minimum wage will also raise costs for Amazon’s competitors. And not every small business will be able to afford to compete with Amazon’s wages.

3. To Do What Bernie Says

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has been on Amazon’s case for a while now. Back in August, Sanders openly called out Bezos for mistreating workers, and Sanders was hardly the first to do so.

Bezos might be aligning his company with the left in the U.S. to get ahead the “blue wave” — a wave of Democratic wins for House and Senate seats in the last couple of months leading up to the midterm elections.

Sanders seemed to be satisfied by the $15 minimum wage announcement and urged other companies to follow Bezos’ lead. “You cannot continue to pay your workers starvation wages,” Sanders told CNN‘s Wolf Blizter in an interview. “Learn from what Bezos has done. He has done the right thing. You have got to do it as well.” The rest of the appalling work conditions? Well hopefully Amazon will just figure it out.

4. To Appease Restless Employees

Amazon has been suppressing all of its employees’ efforts to unionize ever since the company was founded in 1994, The Guardian reports.

A higher minimum wage often reduces employees’ desire to unionize to fight for better working conditions (at least a little bit). “And now, amid growing labour unrest and intense anti-union activity on Amazon’s part, a conveniently-timed wage hike,” as Motherboard notes.

Amazon has made the right decision to hold itself accountable for paying (at least more of) its half a million employees a fair, livable wage, and fighting for more companies to do the same.

Bezos is not a hero, and it would be a mistake to call him that. Money talks — and that goes not only for all the minimum wage earners out there, but especially for the richest man on the planet.

More on Amazon’s working conditions: An Amazon Patent Would Use Cages to Keep Employees “Safe”

View post:
4 Reasons Why Amazon Workers Might Have Gotten a Raise

This Futuristic Aircraft Could Take You From New York to Boston in 36 Minutes

Posted on by

HeliJet

The craft takes off vertically from any flat surface, like a helicopter, then cruises to your destination like a jet at 724 kilometers per hour (450 miles per hour), far above the traffic below.

That’s the idea behind a prototype aircraft created by Boston startup Transcend Air. The company says the craft could transport a half-dozen passengers at a time between Boston and New York in fewer than 40 minutes.

“We like to boast that we’re not inventing anything new here,” said CEO Greg Bruell in an interview with Travel + Leisure. “We’re taking a concept first demonstrated in the ’60s and finding a market for it, while updating it with the latest technology so that it doesn’t cost military-scale budgets to build them.”

Elite Travel

As Quartz pointed out, a Boston-New York flight from a conventional airport could easily take three hours between clearing security, boarding, and driving to the airport.

But passengers will have to pay for Transcend Air’s elite service. A one-way trip from New York to Boston will run $283 — easily double the cost of a conventional flight.

Hold It

There are a few more caveats. The service won’t launch until 2024 at the earliest. And to save on space, the next-gen aircraft won’t have bathrooms, so no grande mochas before take-off.

Ultimately, Transcend Air’s prototype is a glimpse of a stylish future for air transportation — even if, like private jets, it’ll inevitably cater to the wealthy.

READ MORE: Flying Taxi Company Wants to Get You From New York City to Boston in 36 Minutes [Travel + Leisure]

More on flying taxis: The World’s First Flying Taxis Will Take to the Skies in Five Months

The rest is here:
This Futuristic Aircraft Could Take You From New York to Boston in 36 Minutes

The First Full-Scale Hyperloop Passenger Capsule Has Arrived

Posted on by

Pod People

We’ve seen more sketches and animated demo videos of hyperloops than we can count. But now, one of leaders of the industry has finally shown us something we can touch.

During a ceremony in Spain on Tuesday, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HyperloopTT) unveiled the Quintero One, a pod designed to whisk passengers across vast distances, through depressurized tubes, as part of the high-tech transportation system of the future.

The company also released a video detailing the manufacturing of the capsule on the same day.

The Deets

Quintero One is 32 meters (105 feet) long, weighs 5,000 kilograms (5.5 tons), and took 5,000 hours to assemble. HyperloopTT constructed it almost entirely out of a custom-built, super-strong, super-light smart material containing a combination of carbon fiber and embedded sensors. These sensors can wirelessly transmit information on everything from temperature to stability in real-time while the capsule is in operation.

On the Move

Next stop for the capsule is HyperloopTT’s research and development center in Toulouse, France, so the company can integrate it into a hyperloop system. According to Bibop Gresta, HyperloopTT’s chairman and co-founder, it will be ready for passengers by 2019.

That’s assuming the company has a hyperloop in place to support it, of course.

The idea of a hyperloop has been floating around since Elon Musk first posed the concept back in 2013, and HyperloopTT is just one of several companies developing the technology.

Despite all the hype, though, we still don’t have a hyperloop. But hey, at least this pod’s a step in the right direction.

READ MORE: First Hyperloop Passenger Capsule Unveiled [Bloomberg]

More on HyperloopTT: CEO of a Hyperloop Company Has Some Surprising Thoughts on the Future of Transportation

Read more from the original source:
The First Full-Scale Hyperloop Passenger Capsule Has Arrived

Researchers Think They’ve Discovered the First Moon Outside Our Solar System

Posted on by

Many Moons

Moons are everywhere in our solar system — we have one, Mars has two, Jupiter and Saturn have dozens each — but we’ve never known whether moons are as common, or even exist at all, outside our Sun’s orbit.

That may have just changed.

On Wednesday, Columbia University researchers announced that they’d found the first evidence of an “exomoon” — a moon orbiting a planet beyond Earth’s solar system.

Survey Says

The discovery of the exomoon began with a survey of 284 transiting planets — meaning they pass between a star and an instrument we use to observe space (in this case NASA’s Kepler space telescope).

A planet passing in front of a star causes a noticeable dip in the star’s brightness, which astronomers can analyze to deduce information about a planet, such as its size and composition. In the case of Kepler-1625b, a Jupiter-sized planet about 4,000 lightyears from Earth, the Kepler survey data was a little different than the typical exoplanet, suggesting that it may have a moon.

The Columbia team then used the more-powerful Hubble telescope to study Kepler-1625b, looking for any additional dimming that would confirm the exomoon, or any sign that it was affecting the planet’s gravity. They found both.

Looking Up

Despite that evidence, the researchers caution that their work is preliminary, and it will need confirmed by future studies.

“We are trying to be cautious with our claims at this point… we want to see a little more before we come out and say, ‘Yes, this thing is definitely there,'” researcher Alex Teachey told reporters during a press briefing. “In that sense, we are not cracking open champagne bottles just yet on this one.”

And as of this week, though, it’s safe to say that many fresh pairs of eyes will set their sights on Kepler-1625b.

READ MORE: Thanks to Help From Hubble, the First Confirmed Exomoon? [EurekAlert]

More on exomoons: Do Exomoons Exist?

See original here:
Researchers Think They’ve Discovered the First Moon Outside Our Solar System

Nihilism: the denial of meaning | Meaningness

Posted on by

Nihilism holds that there is no meaning or value anywhere. Questions about purpose, ethics, and sacredness are unanswerable because they are meaningless. You might as well ask about the sleep habits of colorless green ideas as about the meaning of life.

Nihilism is a mirror image of eternalismthe stance that everything is meaningful. (For an introduction, see Preview: eternalism and nihilism.) However, the two stances are not simply opposites; they share fundamental metaphysical assumptions.

Eternalism and nihilism both fail to recognize that nebulosity and pattern are inseparable. Therefore they suppose that real meaning would be absolutely patterned: perfectly definite and certain, unchanging and objective. This is their shared metaphysical error.

Eternalism insists that meaning really is like that. That is its second metaphysical error. Nihilism observes, accurately, that no such meaning is possible. This corrects the second error. However, because nihilism shares the first error, it concludes that meaning is impossible, period. This is also wrong; nebulous meanings are real, for any reasonable definition of real.

Nihilism is attractive to those who have explicitly recognized, understood, and rejected eternalisms second error: belief in ultimate meaning. That is not easy. Nihilism is, therefore, the more intelligent stance. Or, at least, its a stance that tends to be adopted more often by more intelligent people. (Its even more dysfunctional than eternalism, so we could also call it less intelligent.)

While most people are committed, however waveringly, to eternalism, only a few commit to nihilism. In denying all meaning, nihilism is wildly implausible. Only a few sociopaths, intellectuals, and depressives try to maintain it.

Well see, though, that almost everyone adopts the nihilistic stance at times, without noticing. When the complete stance is unknown, nihilism seems like the only possible defense against the harmful lies of eternalism. (Just as eternalism seems like the only possible salvation from the harmful lies of nihilism.)

Even if you are relatively immune to nihilism, its important to understand as a prototype. Many other confused stances are modified or limited forms of nihilism. They reject particular types of meanings, rather than rejecting all meaningfulness. That makes their distortions, harms, and emotional dynamics similar to nihilisms.

The first page in this section discusses several obstacles you must overcome to even get to nihilism. The main one is the obviousness of meaning. Even before that, you have to let go of the hope that eternalism can somehow be made to work. There are also strong social and cultural taboos against nihilism. Finally, nihilism has nasty psychological side-effects that make you miserable.

The second page explains briefly what it would mean to accomplish nihilism: a state of total apathy. This would, theoretically, end suffering (which is one reason nihilism is attractive). Its probably impossible, although some religious systems seem to advocate it.

Most of my discussion of nihilism concerns its emotional dynamics. I begin with an analogy: eternalism is like one of those email scams that promises you millions of dollars in exchange for help getting money out of Nigeria. If you fall for that, catastrophic financial loss ensues.

Nihilism entails a similar catastrophic loss: the loss of meaning. The next page gives an overview of our psychological reactions to that loss: rage, intellectual argument, depression, and anxiety. Each gets its own, more detailed page.

In addition, I address the content of nihilistic intellectualization. This is a collection of reasons for rejecting obvious meanings as not really meaningful. They are supposedly the wrong kind of meaning; not ultimate, not objective, not eternal, not inherent, or not higher. So what? These arguments are bogus and nonsensical. They usually conceal a hidden motivation: the issue is not qualitative (the wrong kind of meaning) but quantitative (available meanings seem inadequately compelling). This is a psychological and practical problem, not a philosophical one, so psychological and practical methods may help.

The antidotes to nihilism are partly intellectual: realizing why its incorrect and harmful. Mainly, though, antidotes restore meaningfulness, by making it more powerful, more obvious, more compelling, more enjoyable.

Excerpt from:

Nihilism: the denial of meaning | Meaningness

Technology – The Atlantic

Posted on by

What should have been a routine, required national test of the Wireless Emergency Alerts system has become a crucible for public distrust.

Viewership for the major news networks was high, but TV only tells half the story.

When workers automate their own duties, who should reap the benefits?

In a battery-powered reboot, the 90s toy is living up to its destiny.

Just ask Bill Gates how it works.

A computer has written a novel narrating its own cross-country road trip.

Private-labeled teas helped fund success during the suffragist movement. Todays activists might learn from their model. An Object Lesson.

In a special bonus episode of the podcast Crazy/Genius, the computer scientist and data journalist Meredith Broussard explains how technochauvinism derailed the dream of the digital revolution.

Musk and Tesla have settled the SECs securities-fraud lawsuit. The outcome feels like the end of an era for Musk.

Facebook has identified, and fixed, an exploit that allowed attackers to gain control of user accounts. These failures are so common and so widespread, its becoming hard to even notice them.

The SECs suit against the Tesla CEO is the latest sign that he cant separate his companys performance from his vision for the future.

Commercial companies are proposing lunar missions at a pace the world hasnt seen since the Apollo program.

Body cameras that automatically activate in response to the sound of gunfire could forever change peoples expectations about public spaces.

Violent mobs in India may have gotten inflammatory messages on WhatsApp, but the license to maim and kill came from long-standing cultural divisions and governmental failures.

The company will begin estimating local carbon pollution from cities around the world.

The companys three high-profile acquisitionsInstagram, WhatsApp, and Oculushad fought to maintain their own identity. Those days may be over now.

Anxieties about the effects of screens on human health are hardly new, but the way the public addresses the problems has changed. An Object Lesson.

The companys new line of voice-automated products, including a wall clock and a microwave, could help it amass an enormous database of consumer behavior.

Microchip implants are going from tech-geek novelty to genuine health tooland you might be running out of good reasons to say no.

The Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation into the Tesla founder, but theres no precedent for him, or his tweets.

Continued here:

Technology - The Atlantic

TechCrunch Startup and Technology News

Posted on by

Embattled Chinese tech firm ZTE narrowly survived after the U.S. Department of Commerce hit it with a $1 billion fine and forced changes to its business earlier this year, and.Now it is back in the

In less than two months, thousands of the best and brightest minds from the European and international tech startup scene will attend Disrupt Berlin 2018. The conference, which takes place November 29

Jake Bright Contributor Jake Bright is a writer and author in New York City. He is co-author of The Next Africa. More posts by this contributor Polestar unveils first production EV with aim to overtak

Amazons announcement this week that it will raise its minimum wage for workers in the United States and United Kingdom earned it a wave of positive publicity, but backlash is already growing as rep

SoftBank is getting into self-driving car services after the Japanese tech giant announced a joint-venture with Toyota in its native Japan. SoftBank is invested in Uber and a range of other ride-haili

Fitbit data may have helped catch one of its customers killers, and not for the first time. According to numerous media reports, a 90-year-old visited his stepdaughter at her home in San Jose,

We've known for months now that Jon Favreau was working on a live-action Star Wars series for Disney's upcoming streaming service. But that's about all we knew.Until now! Favreau just dropped a fe

Blizzard the company behind massive game titles like World of Warcraft, Overwatch, and Hearthstone is getting new leadership. After 27 years, Blizzard President Mike Morhaime is stepping down

Kia is finally sharing more details about its upcoming all-electric crossover the 2019 Kia e-Niro that made its debut in Korea earlier this year. The upshot: its got some range. The pro

Nintendo is nearing its 130th birthday, and the company is once again in the midst of major changes as it embraces mobile platforms and online services. But Nintendo of America's president Reggie Fils

The Wi-Fi Alliance, the working group that has long offered such euphonious, IEEE-defined names for Wi-Fi protocols such as 802.11ab and 802.11n, has finally decided enough was enough with the numbers

Scientists interested in cannabis as a subject for pharmaceutical studies may find an unlikely new home for their research into the plant, its byproducts and biochemistry aboard the International Spac

Nearly a year after German fintech startup N26 announced that it would launch its service in the U.K., the company is launching in the U.K. N26 is already quite popular in the Eurozone, with more than

Kobo's latest e-reader is a complete about-face from its anonymous, cheap, and highly practical Clara HD; the Forma is big, expensive, and features a bold not to say original design. It's clea

Over the years, Hadoop, the once high-flying open-source platform, gave rise to many companies and an ecosystem of vendors emerged. It was long believed that some major companies would emerge from the

Suppose the next time you go to a new doctors office, you wouldnt have to balance a clipboard on your knee, write down your whole medical history, remember the five-syllable name of every medica

Thats two on the front and three on the rear. LGs already teased the upcoming flagship quite a bit in the lead up to todays announcement. Understandably so. Its hard for a company like thi

Along with the new V40 ThinQ, LG showed off this odd little addition. Its true that hybrid smartwatches are no longer a novelty in and of themselves at this point, but the Watch W7 takes a bizarre

Weve got some new faces around TechCrunch some of them real fresh and some who you might know. Though you might have seen some of their bylines around the site, I thought it would be nice t

A beloved regional burger chain in the Pacific Northwest is the latest fast food company to suffer a major data breach. Burgerville, headquartered in Vancouver, Wash., disclosed today that any custome

Visit link:

TechCrunch Startup and Technology News

Technology r/technology – reddit

Posted on by

We have posted this before, but this needs to be reiterated.

We understand that many of you are emotionally driven to discuss your feelings on recent events, most notably the repeal of Net Neutrality - however inciting violence towards others is never ok. It is upsetting that we even have to post this.

Do we enjoy banning people for these types of offences? No... Many of us feel as if the system has failed and want some form of repercussion. But threats of violence and harassment are not the answer here.

And to be clear - here are some examples of what will get you banned:

I hope this PoS dies in a car fire

I want to punch him in the face til his teeth fall out

And if you are trying to be slick by using this form

I never condone violence but...

I would never say he should die but...

Im not one to wish death upon but...

Let's keep the threads civil.

If you violate this rule, you will be banned for 30 days, no exceptions

Read more:

Technology r/technology - reddit

Crude Oil Processing on Offshore Facilities

Posted on by

1.0 PURPOSE

This design guide is prepared to provide basic information and consideration for the process design aspect of Crude Oil Processing for typical offshore facilities. This document provides an overview of separation of crude oil from well fluid for further processing.

This guide covers the overall summary of processing schemes, typical crude specification, and data to help developing a preliminary phase of design.

Specific requirements of Project / Client / Local regulations shall prevail over the contents of this guide.

API Gravity

API gravity is a measure of how heavy or light a petroleum liquid is compared to water. API gravity is defined by the following formula;

Asphaltenes

Asphaltenes are molecular substances in crude oil that are insoluble in low boiling hydrocarbon liquids such as heptane and are also non-distillable. These molecules are made up of aromatic clusters containing a polar heteroatom group. In large molecules the aromatic rings are interconnected by paraffinic groups and by sulphur

Cloud Point

Cloud point is the temperature at which dissolved solids are no longer completely soluble, precipitating as a second phase giving the fluid a cloudy appearance. In the petroleum industry, cloud point refers to the temperature below which wax in crude oil form a cloudy appearance. Cloud point is measured by ASTM D-2500 testing method.

Pour Point

Pour point is the temperature at which the crude oil becomes semi solid and ceases to flow. The pour point is measured by ASTM D-97 testing method.

Reid Vapour Pressure

Reid Vapour Pressure (RVP) is measured by ASTM D-323 testing method. The sample is placed in a chamber at a constant temperature of 100 oF. RVP is slightly lower than the True Vapour Pressure (TVP) at 100 oF.Stabilization

Crude stabilization is a process of removing volatile components from crude oil to reduce its vapour pressure.

BS&W : Basic Sediment & Water

FTHP : Flowing Tubing Head Pressure

GOR : Gas Oil Ratio

PTB : Pounds of salt per thousand barrels of oil

Ppm : Part per million

RVP : Reid Vapour PressureTEG : Triethylene GlycolTVP : True Vapour Pressure

The primary function of a production facility is to separate the product from the wells into saleable products and dispose of the rest in an environmentally friendly manner. The product from the wells typically consists of oil; gas; associated produced water and sediment. Figure 1 shows a typical schematic of oil and gas production.

Figure 1. Typical Oil and Gas Production Schematic

Well fluids enter a separation train where the crude oil, gas, and bulk water are separated. The separation train may consist of several stages of separators. In the separation train, most volatile components of the well fluid will be vaporized. Thus the crude oil will either be stabilized or partially stabilized. Crude stabilization is performed to achieve the specified RVP

After free water removal, produced oil may contain residual emulsified water. The crude oil is then further processed in a dehydration unit to reduce the water content to a value that acceptable for transportation or sales. Dilution water must occasionally be added to reduce the salt content of the residual emulsion to a suitably low level. The addition of dilution water and followed by dehydration is called desalting process.

Gas separated from the separation train enters the gas processing train. The train normally comprises of gas compression system and gas dehydration system. Gas dehydration unit is required to remove water from the gas stream to prevent hydrate and corrosion problem in the pipeline. The most common method for gas dehydration is a TEG contactor unit which is completed with a TEG regeneration system. The TEG (liquid) absorbs water from the gas stream to achieve the specified water content of the export gas.

Compression of the gas to pipeline pressure is normally required to allow economic transport in reasonable small diameter pipeline.

A more complex gas processing train may include gas sweetening system to remove the acid gases which are CO2 and H2S. Both gases are very corrosive when liquid water is present. Gas sweetening usually uses aqueous solution of various chemicals. Therefore a gas sweetening, if required, is normally placed upstream of dehydration unit. However, gas sweetening system is not common for offshore processing facilities. Generally, any sour gas produced from offshore will be further processed in onshore gas plant.

Separated water from the well fluids is directed to the produced water treatment unit to render the water suitable for disposal to the sea. Oil removal is the first treatment for produced water. Oil-water emulsions are difficult to clean up due to the small size of the particles, as well as the presence of emulsifying agents. Hydrocyclone is common equipment for produced water de-oiling purpose.

As an alternate of disposing water into the sea, the produced water could be re-injected into water injection wells. Before re-injection, produced water is usually filtered and treated with biocides. Booster pumps and injection pumps are normally installed for water injection system.This guideline discusses the treatment of the crude oil to meet the product specifications such as vapor pressure, base sediment and water, salt content, and H2S concentration.

Crude oils vary widely in composition and physical properties. Some are almost gas-like materials of 65o API gravity, whereas others are semisolid asphaltic material with API gravities of less than 10o. Light crude are generally more valuable to refineries and are easier to handle than heavy crudes. Heavy crudes are more difficult to produce and sell.

Offshore crude oil product may be stored on the platform in large tanks (i.e. FPSO, FSO) and exported by a tanker, or exported through a pipeline. Typical specifications of crude oil are as follow:

A low vapor pressure is important for stability of the crude during storage and transport, especially if the crude is transported via tanker. A high vapor pressure results in loss of volatile components in storage tanks or tankers. Gases evolved from unstable crude are heavier than air and difficult to disperse. Consequently the risk of explosion is greater. To prevent the release of gas during transport or storage, the vapor pressure specification is usually from 10 to 12 psia RVP.

For pipeline export, the crude oil is sometimes partially stabilized. The true vapor pressure (TVP) of the crude is typically 6.9 Bara at 38 C. This value is considered to retain a large part of C3-C4 components in the liquid stream. The crude oil will be further stabilized at onshore terminal facilities and the C3-C4 can be converted into LPG product. The TVP will be set in conjunction with the operating parameters of the pipelines and must be lower than the proposed arrival pressure at the delivery location. The crude oil must be pumped to ensure pipeline is liquid phase throughout.

The presence of water in the crude oil must be limited for the following reasons;

Shipping emulsified oil wastes costly transportation capacities occupied by water

Mineral salts present in produced water corrode equipment, pipeline, and storage tanks.

Dissolved sediments in water can cause plugging and scaling problems to heat exchangers and column trays in the refinery.

In the Gulf of Mexico, 1% BS & W typically meets offshore crude sales specifications. Other parts of the world require crudes with less than 0.5% water by volume, especially if the crude is loaded offshore to tankers.

Salts can cause severe corrosion in tankers, pipeline, and refining equipment. Salts cake out inside equipment, cause poor flow and plugging, reduce heat transfer rates in exchangers. Under some circumstances chlorides can hydrolyze to HCL, which is extremely corrosive. In addition, some mineral salts can poison expensive catalysts. Therefore the salt concentration in the crude oil must be limited. The salt content in the crude product is typically specified at 10 30 PTB

H2S is removed from crude oil together with flash gas at each separation stage. 50 ppm by volume can normally be achieved using simple separators and heating. Though normally not used in offshore facilities, 20 ppm and lower can normally only be achieved by the use of a re-boiled stripper.

Well fluids are complex mixtures of different compounds of carbon and hydrogen with different densities, vapor pressure and physical characteristics. As the well fluids travel from the reservoir to the production facility, it experiences pressure and temperature reduction. The characteristics of the well stream continuously changes with the evolving gas from the liquid as the pressure reduces. The separation of these phases is one of the basic operations in production, processing and treatment.

The oil production system begins at the wellhead, which includes at the least one choke valve, whose percentage opening determines the flowrate from the wells. Most of the pressure drop between the well flowing tubing head pressure (FTHP) and the separator operating pressure occur across the choke valve.Whenever two or more wells are installed on a wellhead platform, a production manifold as well as test manifold should be installed to gather fluid from the wells prior to be processed in separator or exported via pipeline. The test manifold is provided to allow an individual well to be tested either via a Test Separator or Multiphase Flowmeter (MPFM).

As described earlier, the well-stream may consist of crude oil, gas, condensates, water and various contaminants. The purpose of a separator is to split the flow into desirable fractions. Primary separation of produced water from gas and oil is carried out in production separator. Separators work on the principle of gravity separation.

Following type of separators are generally used in the industry:

A two phase separator is used to separate well fluids into gas and liquid mixtures.

This type of separator is used when the expected outlet streams are gas, oil / condensate, and water.

Figure 2. Typical Three Phase Separator with Internals

A separator can be either horizontal or vertical configuration,

Horizontal separator is preferred for low GOR well fluids and three phase separation.

Table below shows the advantages and disadvantages of horizontal separators:

Advantages

Disadvantages

Provide sufficient residence time for liquid-liquid separation

Only part of shell available for passage of gas

Large liquid surface area for foam dispersion generally reduces turbulence

Larger foot print / plot area

Large surge volume capacity

Liquid level control is more critical

Lend themselves to skid mounting and shipping

More difficult to clean produced sand, mud, wax, paraffin. etc.

Vertical separator is preferred high GOR well fluids and two phase separation

Table below shows the advantages and disadvantages of vertical separators:

Advantages

Disadvantages

Have full diameter for gas flow at top and oil flow at bottom

Not suitable for bulk liquid-liquid separation

Occupy smaller plot area

Occupy more vertical spacing between decks in offshore

Liquid level control is not so critical

More difficult to skid mount and ship

Have good bottom drain and clean out facilities. Can handle more sand, mud, paraffin, wax, etc.

More difficult to reach and service top-mounted instruments and safety devices

Production separators of all types are sized according to the following parameters, to suit product specifications:

Fluid flow rates

Operating Pressure and Temperature

Oil in Water Specification (500-1000 ppm)

Water in Oil Specification (1-3% vol)

Liquid losses to vapor stream (subject to demister type)

Liquid droplet size in gas outlet (150 microns and larger droplets can be removed when internals are not used)

In an oil system, separators are generally sized on the basis of liquid residence time. Particular attention must be given to foam and emulsion forming tendency of the crude oil. Data can be obtained from laboratory analysis or from previous experience. The tendency of crude oil to foam will require

larger separator in order to maintain satisfactory vapor/liquid separation efficiency,

chemical injection,

specialist internals e.g. foam breaker.

Separation between water and oil is subject to the quality of emulsion and the terminal velocity of droplets as given by Stokes Law. Crude oil with high viscosity and density (i.e Heavy Oil), will result in a very low droplet settling velocity and hence will require more residence time and consequently a large vessel size. Where emulsions are formed, de-emulsifying chemicals and heating may facilitate the water removal, although the provision of a separate two phase (oil/water) separator may be required in severe cases.

At the design stage of crude oil separation train, an increased water production should be considered. Separators must be sized for the worst operating case, or alternatively, adjustments may be made to existing separator internals and level control set points in order to change the hold-up times of the two phases.For sizing criteria and calculation of a separator, refer to the company developed guideline and validated spreadsheets.

Dissolved gas in the crude oil must be removed to meet pipeline, storage, or tanker RVP specification. The presence of most volatile hydrocarbons increases the RVP. Removal of the dissolved natural gas components is called oil stabilization.

Crude oil can be stabilized by passing it through multiple separators in series where the volatile components will vaporize. A stabilization column might replace the simple flash-separation stages to achieve the required RVP, but these columns are rarely found offshore.

Stabilization of the crude oil often requires heat to be added or removed at certain points in the processing train. Crude heating may be required for:

Particular attention should be given for high temperature well stream fluids, it may be necessary to cool the crude in order to avoid excessive vaporization resulting in lower than required RVP of the final product specification and loss of potential liquid product.

For crude oils containing wax, care must be taken in assessing skin temperature inside coolers so that wax deposition is avoided. Skin temperatures should be at least 5oC above the crude oil cloud point. When the cooling water supply temperature is below this temperature, a cooling water recycle can be incorporated to raise the cooling water inlet to the required temperature. When the minimum cooling water temperature is marginal for wax deposition, wax inhibitor injection may be considered instead of a cooling water recycle system.

Number of Separation Stage

The well fluid pressure is often reduced in several stages of separation. If the reservoir conditions are such that the reservoir fluid can flow adequately against a wellhead pressure, separation in more than one stage will generally offer an economic advantage. The purpose of multi stage separation is to achieve maximum hydrocarbon liquid recovery, to get the liquid stabilized, and minimize compression power required for the gas stream. Multi stage separation of oil and gas involves a series of separators operating at sequentially reduced pressures, with liquid flowing from first separator to the next lower pressure separator.

When hydrocarbon liquids are removed from separator at equilibrium, the liquid is at its bubble point. With each subsequent pressure reduction, additional vapors are liberated. If the liquids were removed directly from a high pressure separator into a stock tank, the resulting vaporization would cause the loss of some heavier ends. Making pressure reductions in several stages can help reducing these losses. Therefore, increasing number of separation stages can increase the volume of oil recovered in the stock tank.

If the produced gas is to be gathered and compressed to sales transmission pressure, the allowable compression ratios and compression power requirements will usually determine the pressure ratios between the various stages of separation. Therefore, the process engineer must evaluate the number of separation stages, compression requirements, and economics of each specific installation.

A process simulation program such as HYSYS is generally used to design and optimize a crude oil processing system to meet a given crude specification, usually vapour pressure (either TVP or RVP). Selection of a system is based on maximizing the crude output whilst minimizing energy requirement (i.e. heating/cooling loads, compression power, etc.). Equipment size and weight is also a critical criterion.

The off gas from each separation stage can be compressed and treated for use as fuel gas, exported, or flared if quantities are minimal and applicable regulations permit flaring. In designing the oil processing system the gas compression requirements influence the total energy input. Additionally the recycle of hydrocarbon condensate from the gas compression system must be included as this will influence the performance of the system.

The optimum number of separation stages varies with Flowing Wellhead Pressure (FWHP), reservoir composition, off-gas compression requirement, and export specification for crude vapor pressure. A quick assessment of separation stages number based on FWHP is given in the table below:

FWHP, Bara

Read more here:

Crude Oil Processing on Offshore Facilities