Month: April 2022

Enlarge / Water levels at the Hoover Dam are well below capacity. (credit: Jorge Villalba)

News that Arizona’s Lake Powell is slowly but surely drying up has spread far and wide. The reservoir behind the 1,320-megawatt Glen Canyon Dam and power station, Lake Powell plays an important role in providing power for some 3 million customers in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.

But this year, the reservoir has hit a historic low, thanks to ongoing drought conditions in the region that have been attributed, at least in part, to climate change. The dam may even stop producing power if the situation continues to worsen, and this issue is not an isolated one in the American Southwest.

The Colorado River, an important source for many dams and power plants in the region, has been wracked by drought for the past 22 years—some research even suggests that it is subject to the worst drought the area has seen in 1,200 years. Further, according to the US Drought Monitor, as of March 29, 88.75 percent of the Western US has been experiencing a moderate drought or worse. According to staff members at the United States Bureau of Reclamation (USBR), other dams in this be-droughted part of the country are seeing similar effects—though the officials also noted that each case is different.

Enlarge (credit: AMD)

Back in September, AMD added support for simple CPU overclocking to its graphics drivers. If you had a Ryzen 5000-series CPU and wanted to benefit from a bit of extra performance, this auto-overclocking function could save you from needing to download the more complex Ryzen Master utility, and the overclock would be conservative enough that it probably wouldn't cause system instability or other issues.

The problem for some users is that this auto-overclocking feature has become too automated—that is, it's changing systems' overclocking settings whether users want it to or not.

An AMD representative told Tom's Hardware that "an issue in the AMD software suite" caused the feature to begin "adjusting certain AMD processor settings for some users." Because the CPU overclocking feature is actually changing settings in your system's BIOS, that means it can change overclocking settings that users have changed themselves and apply an overclock where there was no overclock before. That second bit could be especially problematic since overclocking processors generally voids AMD's CPU warranty, even when you're using AMD-provided tools like Ryzen Master or using AMD-advertised features like Precision Boost Overdrive (though, anecdotally, this policy isn't consistently enforced).

Enlarge (credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Intel, one of the world's largest semiconductor companies, is suspending business operations in Russia "effective immediately," the company announced on Tuesday.

"Intel continues to join the global community in condemning Russia’s war against Ukraine," the company said in a statement. Intel stopped shipping chips to customers in Russia and Belarus in early March.

Intel said that it is "working to support all of our employees through this difficult situation, including our 1,200 employees in Russia."

Enlarge / 70 percent of the cars Porsche has ever built are still on the road. Since it wants to keep it that way, it's developing a synthetic fuel that emits 90 percent less CO₂ than gasoline derived from fossil fuels. (credit: Porsche)

In 2021, Porsche announced that it was starting to work with synthetic fuels. The company is rather proud of the fact that so many of the cars it has built over the decades are still on the road and recognizes that the only way to maintain that in an increasingly climate-blighted future will be with synthetic gasoline that's made with carbon sucked from the air.

In September last year, the Haru Oni pilot plant, built for that very purpose, broke ground in Punta Arenas in Chile. That plant was funded in part by Porsche as well as Siemens Energy and ExxonMobil but is being built and will be operated by a Chilean startup called HIF Global. On Wednesday Porsche announced that it was investing $75 million to buy a 12.5 percent stake in the startup.

The efuel-making process at Haru Oni starts by capturing CO₂ from the air and using wind power to electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen. The carbon and hydrogen are used to synthesize methanol, and the methanol is then turned into longer hydrocarbons using ExxonMobil's methanol-to-gasoline process.