We are excited to announce the release of Amazon Lumberyard Beta 1.5, which includes 210 new improvements, fixes and features to Amazon’s free, AAA game engine deeply integrated with AWS and Twitch. Lumberyard Beta 1.5 introduces an Asset Builder SDK, so game developers can track, reload, automatically rebuild, and process any asset formats their game requires. Additionally, Lumberyard Beta 1.5 adds support for OSVR virtual reality devices, new component entities so developers can build gameplay with less engineering support, distance-based particle effects optimization, and more. Read about the update in the GameDev Blog and the Lumberyard Beta 1.5 release notes .

Amazon Web Services has open-sourced the emr-dynamodb-connector, which enables Apache Hive and Apache Spark on Amazon EMR to access data in Amazon DynamoDB. You can process data directly in Amazon DynamoDB using these applications, or join tables in Amazon DynamoDB with external tables in Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, or other data stores that can be accessed by Amazon EMR. The connector is still included for use on each node in your Amazon EMR cluster. To learn more or contribute to the project, visit the emr-dynamodb-connector GitHub page .

Diageo’s on-site biogas plant at Glendullan fully operational for 12 months, turning 1,000m³ of malt whisky distillery co-products per day into 16 MW hours of renewable heat.

International Microbial Associates and Microbe Detectives partner on solutions.

The water district has agreed to an exclusive contract for Ovivo’s patented post-aerobic digestion process, DigestivorePAD.

The King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology (KACST) has opened what it is calling the world’s first “adsorption water desalination and cooling plant”, known as ADC…

A Google survey conducted by Plumbing Manufacturers International (PMI) asked 1,000 respondents about their concerns relating to water infrastructure.

Steve Fletcher of Illinois was elected as the President of the National Rural Water Association during meetings held at the WaterPro Conference in Orlando, Fla.

I was interested in the capacitance multiplier included to reduce hum in Allo’s Vana hi-fi amplifier for Raspberry Pi and the firm’s own Sparky computer. So I googled a bit and came across this detailed article on the subject on a website called StarFetch. The website describes the simple version in the image, which comes from …

Read full article: Capacitance multipliers explained

The thing about these reports of Apple’s approach to McLaren is: Were these approaches before or after Apple’s cut-backs to the staff of its in-house car project? Last week reports said that Apple is laying off engineers from its in-house car project and that Apple would now try to produce not a car, but technology …

Read full article: The McCar