Tag: jeff bezos

“Shame & Name” Climate Activist Satellite Backed By Bezos Lost

A high-resolution Earth-observation satellite designed to monitor and map global methane emissions has been lost after a power failure.

The $88 million satellite, called MethaneSAT, owned by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and backed by Jeff Bezos, was lost ten days ago… 

On Friday, June 20, the MethaneSAT mission operations lost contact with MethaneSAT. After pursuing all options to restore communications, we learned this morning that the satellite has lost power, and that it is likely not recoverable. While this is difficult news, it is not the end of the overall MethaneSAT effort, or of our work to slash methane emissions.

MethaneSAT was launched in March 2024 and delivered data on methane emissions, focusing on the “name and shame” operations of global oil and gas assets worldwide. It was built on Blue Canyon Technologies’ X-Sat platform and carried a custom infrared spectrometer from Ball Aerospace, capable of detecting methane sources both large and small.  

Reuters reported that MethaneSAT’s last known position was over Svalbard, Norway, and the EDF has acknowledged it is unlikely to be recovered.

“We’re seeing this as a setback, not a failure,” Amy Middleton, senior vice president at EDF, told Reuters, adding, “We’ve made so much progress and so much has been learned that if we hadn’t taken this risk, we wouldn’t have any of these learnings.”

MethaneSAT stated, “To solve the climate challenge requires bold action and risk-taking and this satellite was at the leading edge of science, technology and advocacy.” 

Keep reading

Eco-Hypocrites Take Hundreds Of Private Jets To Bezos Wedding

Around a hundred private jets carrying celebrities have descended on Italy to deliver eco-hypocrites including Leonardo DiCaprio, Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates to the wedding of tech billionaire Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez.

Bezos is holding a three day event, yes three days, in Venice at a cost of somewhere in the region of $50-100 million.

While the exact same people lecture you about taking the occasional economy flight for a family getaway, they’re literally chartering their own carbon spewing flights just for themselves to attend a piss up.

Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez are getting married in Venice, and the three-day wedding celebration will bring in nearly 100 private jets and a guest list full of billionaires and celebrities, including Oprah and Leonardo DiCaprio, Mercury News reports.

Streets have been closed, boats rerouted, and security teams stationed across the city for the event, taking place from June 26-28. Now, people who live there — and plenty of others online — are calling the whole thing over-the-top and extremely out of touch.

Keep reading

Zuckerberg And Bezos To Donate $1 Million Each To Trump’s Inauguration Fund

Tech leaders Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos of Meta and Amazon are both reportedly giving a million dollars to President Trump’s inauguration fund.

Zuckerberg’s donation comes following a private dinner he had with Trump at his Florida home

The Wall Street Journal reports that the donation is part of an effort by Zuckerberg to ease tensions between him and Trump.

Trump previously threatened to prosecute and jail Zuckerberg and anyone else who interfered in the election by using their tech platforms to censor information in the same vein as the Hunter Biden laptop revelations in 2020. 

Keep reading

‘A Little Dystopian’: Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates Bankrolling Methane Vaccine for Cattle

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is investing $9.4 million to develop a vaccine designed to reduce the number of methane-producing microbes in a cow’s stomach, Agriland reported.

The funding comes from his Bezos Earth Fund, a philanthropy he established with $10 billion in 2020. The fund intends to distribute all of its money by 2030, by funding projects to “fight climate change and protect nature.”

Researchers at the United Kingdom’s Pirbright Institute and Royal Veterinary College, and New Zealand’s AgResearch are among the groups receiving funding to research how a vaccine could reduce the methane emitted by cows as they digest and expel food through manure, flatulence and burping.

“Vaccines have proven to be an incredibly cost-effective way to deliver global health solutions,” said Bezos Earth Fund President and CEOAndrew Steer in a press release. “If we can apply this approach to vaccinate cattle and reduce emissions, the scalability and impact could be phenomenal.”

Although scientists have sporadically researched methane vaccines for over four decades, no vaccine yet exists. The project’s first goal is to show that such a vaccine is possible.

“This grant is a moonshot for proof-of-concept — risky bets like this are essential to tackling the climate crisis,” Steer said, according to Agriland.

The researchers will study how methanogens, or methane-producing microbes, colonize the digestive tract of calves and how their immune system responds to those methanogens.

Keep reading

WaPo’s Favorite Environmental Group Uses ‘Political’ Research To Link Climate Change to Natural Disasters. It’s Also Bankrolled by WaPo Owner Jeff Bezos.

World Weather Attribution was founded in 2014 to produce research linking extreme weather events to climate change. That research is then funneled to mainstream media outlets, giving them what the group calls the “larger global warming context” as they cover natural disasters.

The group found a friend in Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who in 2022 announced a $10 million grant to WWA and two other organizations to “scale effective communication on the links between climate change and extreme weather.” The Bezos Earth Fund said the money would provide the WWA an outlet to “reach the most important audience segments via trusted messengers.”

One such messenger is Bezos’s newspaper, the Washington Post, which has cited WWA research in more than 70 stories over the past three years, a Washington Free Beacon review found. It does so uncritically, publishing the group’s non-peer-reviewed findings to suggest that climate change is to blame for recent natural disasters, including Hurricane Milton. Nonpartisan experts in the field, however, are not so sure of WWA’s methods, portraying the group’s flashy studies as rushed, partisan, and “incomplete.”

Bezos’s funding for the group, paired with the Washington Post‘s favorable coverage of its research, raises questions about the newspaper’s declared independence from its billionaire owner. The Post’s stories citing WWA do not acknowledge that Bezos—who purchased the paper in 2013, one year before the group’s founding—also bankrolls WWA.

“The motivation is entirely political,” Ryan Maue, the former chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said of the climate group. “I’m not sure what the scientific community’s opinion on it is, but my guess is that it has gotten along this far because of its political weight and the media attention that it is given, meaning you don’t want to be on the wrong side of this.”

Maue particularly criticized WWA’s methodology, which consists of determining the probability of a recent extreme weather event, comparing it with the probability of a similar event that occurred decades ago, and attributing the difference to climate change. That leads to flashy findings—but not necessarily accurate ones, according to Maue, who argued that the WWA values speed over accuracy and, as such, produces “incomplete” research.

“What they are able to put out is the headline that climate change made Hurricane Helene worse and then count on the scientific illiteracy of the corporate media in order to produce headlines that become, you know, more and more outlandish, making claims that obviously are not supported by the science,” he told the Free Beacon.

Keep reading

FBI File On Jeff Bezos’ Grandfather, A DARPA Co-Founder, Has Been Destroyed

ZeroHedge reported that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ grandfather, Lawrence Preston Gise, helped form the Pentagon’s supersecret Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA—renamed DARPA) in 1958. Years later, DARPA developed the internet and spurred breakthroughs in high-speed networking, voice recognition, and internet search. When Gise’s FBI file was requested through the Freedom of Information Act, the FBI responded that if there was one, it has been destroyed. News website Leading Report’s Patrick Webb wrote that “There has long been speculation that DARPA has been involved in the creation of many popular big tech companies, using “frontmen” for the allusion of a startup led by outsiders.” Questions swirl about DARPA’s involvement in creating Amazon that hosts ‘secret’ cloud services for the CIA and NSA, and other intel agencies. Some critics speculated that if not for the government contracts, Amazon would be a struggling company.

What’s not widely known is that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ grandfather, Lawrence Preston Gise, helped form the Pentagon’s supersecret Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA—renamed DARPA) in 1958. Years later, DARPA developed the internet and spurred breakthroughs in high-speed networking, voice recognition, and internet search. 

John Greenewald Jr., who operates The Black Vault, a website dedicated to revealing declassified government documents through obtaining Freedom of Information Act requests, posted on X that he went after Gise’s “FBI file, but found out if there was one, it has been destroyed.” 

Keep reading

Brain implant startup backed by Bezos and Gates is testing mind-controlled computing on humans

In a Brooklyn lab stuffed with 3D printers and a makeshift pickleball court, employees at a brain interface startup called Synchron are working on technology designed to transform daily life for people with paralysis.

The Synchron Switch is implanted through the blood vessels to allow people with no or very limited physical mobility to operate technology such as cursors and smart home devices using their mind. So far, the nascent technology has been used on three patients in the U.S. and four in Australia.

“I’ve seen moments between patient and partner, or patient and spouse, where it’s incredibly joyful and empowering to have regained an ability to be a little bit more independent than before,” Synchron CEO Tom Oxley told CNBC in an interview. “It helps them engage in ways that we take for granted.”

Founded in 2012, Synchron is part of the burgeoning brain-computer interface, or BCI, industry. A BCI is a system that deciphers brain signals and translates them into commands for external technologies. Perhaps the best-known name in the space is Neuralink, thanks to the high profile of founder Elon Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter.

But Musk isn’t the only tech billionaire wagering on the eventual transition of BCI from radical science experiment to flourishing medical business. In December, Synchron announced a $75 million financing round that included funding from the investment firms of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Keep reading

Bill Gates And Jeff Bezos Invest In Brain Computer-Interface Company

Just weeks after Elon Musk, co-founder of Neuralink, announced that the company is just six months away from implanting brain-computer interfaces in humans, both Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos invested a hefty sum into Synchron, Inc., a brain computing interface company.

On Thursday, Syncron announced it has received $75 million from its latest round of funding.

A large amount of that $75 million stemmed from an investment by Bezos Expeditions.

Another chunk of the investment came from Gates Frontier which is an investment arm of Bill Gates alongside Microsoft.

Fortune reported these details about Synchron’s goal:

Synchron is focused on restoring some helpful capabilities to paralyzed patients, who can use its Synchron Switch, a brain computer interface (BCI), to move a computer cursor on a screen with just their thoughts. With a minimally-invasive procedure, the BCI is implanted in the blood vessel on the surface of the motor cortex of the brain via the jugular vein. Other companies, including Neuralink, use more invasive techniques that involve going through the skull.

On the surface, it appears Synchron’s goal is to help those disabled but as history teaches us, new technology is usually intercepted and used for war or nefarious plans.

Another reason brain computer-interfaces are a problem for humans is that they are susceptible of being hacked.

Keep reading