#water power engine

[news-cemlet]

Water-fueled car engine unveils by Toyota

 Japan's world-renowned Toyota company is going to make a car powered by water. Currently, this car will run on water. That is, water must be given inside the oil tank.

[zan0tix]

Need more callieroxy in the world.. (withering away) their yuri powers unmatched

[tvckerwash]

rvb au where everything is the same but the soldiers on chorus all wear odst armor

[zexonyte]

yeah i made him a fish lookin thang whatcha gonna do about it

[maaruin]

Atla worldbuilding thought: In Atla steam engines and ships with metal hull exist. Guns, on the other hand, do not exist.

There was a short time window in our history in which guns were ineffective against Ironclads. In one battle they tried the solution of ramming and it worked surprisingly well. But it didn't become common practice because gun technology caught up.

But in the world of Atla, without guns, naval battles would be ramming focussed.

[reasoningdaily]

Forbidden Technologies and The Silencing of Their Inventors

many of these things have been with us for generations, controlled and prevented from reaching mankind by rich people. Mostly because they see the reality of keeping their pockets full instead of keeping mankind living a cleaner less expensive life.

The motion devices, and the power devices need to be forced into discussion since we all know these are what we need now

[solidwater05]

I'm watching a video about a nuclear reactor in Minecraft and I understand the nuclear part better than the redstone part. What the fuck is a monostable circuit.

[gi-nathlam-hi]

As cool as Celebrimbor’s forge is in the show, I was watching a video yesterday about the first sort of…industrialized forges in the Victorian and Edwardian era that used water power. Through clever engineering, rivers became like steam engines that would turn huge wheels not only to power bellows to get forges hot enough to melt iron and cast steel much quicker and easier than a person could work the bellows, but also these wheels would power huge 1.5-3 ton hammers that could flatten plate in seconds (industry shattering tech!) — and I can’t stop thinking about how Eregion is right there on the Glanduin and how badly I want to see them use water power for the forge. Like how cool would it be for them to have huge water wheels to power Celebrimbor’s bellows? The hammers would be no good for jewelsmithing, but it’s the perfect tech to use when you need to kit out an army in record time. Like I want to see Celebrimbor’s giant water wheel with all the might of the Glanduin behind it and watch him excitedly explain how it works. Charles Edwards would do that so well and it would be such a cool set. 😭

[pocketramblr]

So iirc the only thing we know that he needs to drink citrus drinks as fuel but there's no mention of anything else so it's probably blood providing lubrication in his engines as weird as it is to think about

I need to Stop thinking about it every possibility that crosses my mind is gradually getting more horrifying and all roads lead to "ok so if you don't need to mess around with the engine to add oil or anything and it's all normal blood through your body then how did y'all figure out the remove the exhaust pipes to grow faster ones somehow"

[monsterhugger]

i hate being an engineering major bc like 80% of the problems people think could be solved by engineers would actually be solved by 1. government regulation and intervention 2. killing all billionaires

[zumer-feygele]

I'm listening to the last podcast on the left episode on la llorona and they've gotten into the mesoamerican mythos and history behind the story and I keep wincing because they keep getting shit wrong

[automotiveamerican]

A Brief Look at the Innovations Promising to Improve MPG. AKA Snake Oil!

Over the years, various odd technologies have emerged in the U.S. with claims of dramatically improving miles per gallon (MPG) in vehicles. These innovations, while often intriguing, were frequently met with skepticism or controversy due to exaggerated or unverified claims. Here are some notable examples: 1. Fuel Additives and Pills Claims: Various companies have marketed fuel additives or…

[arolesbianism]

We did it boys we got our first game crash in oni 🎉

[reasonsforhope]

As relentless rains pounded LA, the city’s “sponge” infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of water—enough to sustain over 100,000 households for a year.

Earlier this month, the future fell on Los Angeles. A long band of moisture in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped 9 inches of rain on the city over three days—over half of what the city typically gets in a year. It’s the kind of extreme rainfall that’ll get ever more extreme as the planet warms.

The city’s water managers, though, were ready and waiting. Like other urban areas around the world, in recent years LA has been transforming into a “sponge city,” replacing impermeable surfaces, like concrete, with permeable ones, like dirt and plants. It has also built out “spreading grounds,” where water accumulates and soaks into the earth.

With traditional dams and all that newfangled spongy infrastructure, between February 4 and 7 the metropolis captured 8.6 billion gallons of stormwater, enough to provide water to 106,000 households for a year. For the rainy season in total, LA has accumulated 14.7 billion gallons.

Long reliant on snowmelt and river water piped in from afar, LA is on a quest to produce as much water as it can locally. “There's going to be a lot more rain and a lot less snow, which is going to alter the way we capture snowmelt and the aqueduct water,” says Art Castro, manager of watershed management at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “Dams and spreading grounds are the workhorses of local stormwater capture for either flood protection or water supply.”

Centuries of urban-planning dogma dictates using gutters, sewers, and other infrastructure to funnel rainwater out of a metropolis as quickly as possible to prevent flooding. Given the increasingly catastrophic urban flooding seen around the world, though, that clearly isn’t working anymore, so now planners are finding clever ways to capture stormwater, treating it as an asset instead of a liability. “The problem of urban hydrology is caused by a thousand small cuts,” says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley. “No one driveway or roof in and of itself causes massive alteration of the hydrologic cycle. But combine millions of them in one area and it does. Maybe we can solve that problem with a thousand Band-Aids.”

Or in this case, sponges. The trick to making a city more absorbent is to add more gardens and other green spaces that allow water to percolate into underlying aquifers—porous subterranean materials that can hold water—which a city can then draw from in times of need. Engineers are also greening up medians and roadside areas to soak up the water that’d normally rush off streets, into sewers, and eventually out to sea...

To exploit all that free water falling from the sky, the LADWP has carved out big patches of brown in the concrete jungle. Stormwater is piped into these spreading grounds and accumulates in dirt basins. That allows it to slowly soak into the underlying aquifer, which acts as a sort of natural underground tank that can hold 28 billion gallons of water.

During a storm, the city is also gathering water in dams, some of which it diverts into the spreading grounds. “After the storm comes by, and it's a bright sunny day, you’ll still see water being released into a channel and diverted into the spreading grounds,” says Castro. That way, water moves from a reservoir where it’s exposed to sunlight and evaporation, into an aquifer where it’s banked safely underground.

On a smaller scale, LADWP has been experimenting with turning parks into mini spreading grounds, diverting stormwater there to soak into subterranean cisterns or chambers. It’s also deploying green spaces along roadways, which have the additional benefit of mitigating flooding in a neighborhood: The less concrete and the more dirt and plants, the more the built environment can soak up stormwater like the actual environment naturally does.

As an added benefit, deploying more of these green spaces, along with urban gardens, improves the mental health of residents. Plants here also “sweat,” cooling the area and beating back the urban heat island effect—the tendency for concrete to absorb solar energy and slowly release it at night. By reducing summer temperatures, you improve the physical health of residents. “The more trees, the more shade, the less heat island effect,” says Castro. “Sometimes when it’s 90 degrees in the middle of summer, it could get up to 110 underneath a bus stop.”

LA’s far from alone in going spongy. Pittsburgh is also deploying more rain gardens, and where they absolutely must have a hard surface—sidewalks, parking lots, etc.—they’re using special concrete bricks that allow water to seep through. And a growing number of municipalities are scrutinizing properties and charging owners fees if they have excessive impermeable surfaces like pavement, thus incentivizing the switch to permeable surfaces like plots of native plants or urban gardens for producing more food locally.

So the old way of stormwater management isn’t just increasingly dangerous and ineffective as the planet warms and storms get more intense—it stands in the way of a more beautiful, less sweltering, more sustainable urban landscape. LA, of all places, is showing the world there’s a better way.

-via Wired, February 19, 2024