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Helium is light. It makes balloons float. It gives me a high voice. And I just love it. Helium is ALSO light in another way, bandwidth, data. We're talking about the IoT startup, Helium, which offers more effective ways for your toaster and your car to talk to each other, sans the high voice. Crypto-Powered IoT Networks Are on Their Way to Over 250 US Cities – CoinDesk Excerpt: When internet-of-things (IoT) startup Helium first announced its crypto-mining modems, sales of the devices were limited to users in Austin, Texas. The company quickly sold out of its first production run designated for the Texas capital, but now Helium is shipping units much more broadly, to 263 cities around the United States, CoinDesk has learned. Of that group, a company spokesperson said the key cities are New York, San Francisco, Boulder, Denver, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston and Seattle. Shipments for this next wave of hotspot production should begin in October. To recap, Helium is a network meant to help IoT devices like e-scooters, simple sensors and pet trackers get low-volume data to the internet quickly and at very low cost.

Patrolling the skies above sensitive lands, lands in conflict, lands at risk, will be drones. These drones are hunting for other drones. This is not a distant scenario, this is already happening. “It’s Like Terminator!”: How Hunter Drones Can Prevent Drone Attacks – Facility Management Security Quick Read – FacilitiesNet Excerpt: …..The same ability to take a host of sensors and cameras airborne means drones can present a threat to a facility in the wrong hands. Enter the hunter drone. The idea is to control the airspace above a facility or campus. Detection systems use technologies like radar or radio frequency detection, or simply listen for the distinctive whine of rotors. Drones can then be intercepted if they are not allowed in your airspace. Certain technologies can take over control of a drone and bring it down. Or you can shoot a net at it with another drone.

Should all individuals, no matter their disposition, be training for apocalyptic outcomes such as shootings? It might seem like an easy answer, but it's not one that was ever raised, for instance, before American schools started conducting shooting drills with captive audiences at non-consenting ages (minors). Some of the questions now being asked regarding the implementation of VR (virtual reality) Training for mass shooting events perhaps should have been asked before schools conducted these drills as well. Companies can use VR to train employees for mass shootings. But should they? – CNN Excerpt: …..while there may be a large market for such services, Peterson is concerned that they’re not just helping innocent bystanders learn how to cope with a shooting at work or at school: they’re also training the very people who could be perpetrators. She said research indicates that about 90% of school or workplace shootings are committed by former students or employees. It also makes Peterson nervous to put people through simulations in virtual reality in case it triggers a fascination or interest in shootings that wasn’t there previously. “If you’re suicidal, and you’re in crisis, and you have a trauma background, and you have access to weapons, this sort of rehearsal could be problematic,” she said.

A few scientists made a strange discovery that could lead to new solar cell design and manufacturing, new techniques that could open up the development of flexible, efficient solar cells. The strange discovery has to do with the actual percentage of surface area a solar cell needs to be effective. Take a guess before you read on. New Discovery Advances Flexible Solar Cells a Step Closer to Reality – SciTechDaily Excerpt: Scientists at the University of Warwick have discovered that the electrodes in organic solar cells actually only need ~1% of their surface area to be electrically conductive to be fully effective, which opens the door to using a range of composite materials at the interface between the electrodes and the light harvesting organic semiconductor layers to improve device performance and reduce cost. The discovery, published yesterday (September 11, 2019), is reported in Advanced Functional Materials. The academic lead, Dr Ross Hatton from the University’s Department of Chemistry, said: “It’s widely assumed that if you want to optimize the performance of organic solar cells you need to maximize the area of the interface between the electrodes and the organic semiconductors. We asked whether that was really true.” The researchers developed a model electrode that they could systematically change the surface area of, and found that when as much as 99% of its surface was electrically insulating the electrode still performs as well as if 100% of the surface was conducting, provided the conducting regions aren’t too far apart.

It seems the Fed is trying to fix something, something that costs at least $75 billion to fix. They're conducting what's called a 'repo operation' by 'injecting' $75 billion into money markets. Fed to conduct repo operation again tomorrow, will inject up to $75B into money markets – CNBC - VIDEO The Federal Reserve has announced its plans to conduct a repo operation again tomorrow, injecting up to $75B into money markets. CNBC’s Sara Eisen has more.

The kids at MIT have come upon a new advance in 3D printing that will allow 3D printers to print out more complete electronic devices, thanks to embedded circuitry. Engineers Develop 3D-Printed Multimaterial Fiber “Ink” With Embedded Circuitry – SciTechDaily Excerpt: A new method developed by MIT researchers uses standard 3-D printers to produce functioning devices with the electronics already embedded inside. The devices are made of fibers containing multiple interconnected materials, which can light up, sense their surroundings, store energy, or perform other actions. The new 3-D printing method is described in the journal Nature Communication, in a paper by MIT doctoral student Gabriel Loke, professors John Joannopoulos and Yoel Fink, and four others at MIT and elsewhere. The system makes use of conventional 3-D printers outfitted with a special nozzle and a new kind of filament to replace the usual single-material polymer filament, which typically gets fully melted before it’s extruded from the printer’s nozzle. The researchers’ new filament has a complex internal structure made up of different materials arranged in a precise configuration, and is surrounded by polymer cladding on the outside.

Between the :20 mark and the 1:32 mark, 3Dbotmaker explains the lost legal case for YouTube that now places his channel, a diecast racing channel with an adult audience (ask me how I know, because yes, I watch these videos), in a kids channel category, meaning his comments will now be turned off.I chose this video in the Dialecticals to highlight the tried and true adage that so many 'well-intended' social engineers and moral correctarians always fail to respect, the law of unintended consequences.

A man swims across a racing river and, just as he gets to the other side, a baby elephant rescues him from drowning.  The video is 49 seconds long and I recommend you invest the full 49 seconds of your life to enjoy the sweet delivery from the crapola of the universe as one human being, a baby elephant, tries to rescue another....or something.....(yeah, I said it, I said the baby elephant's a HOOMAN!)

Wherein one witnesses the intellectual 'mating' call of the Celebrity TV hostess, 'Jeannie,' and her profound connection with an actual celebrity, Jeezy, demonstrating the "glomming up" technique, which is the exact oppositional technique we in the land of real call 'punching down.'Did it work?  Is she now level with Jeezy, her equal of equals?This is a top trending video on YouTube.  You can start at the 19 second mark.

AI might eventually destroy us all and leave us for dead in a post-apocolyptic world of humachines fhgting over the last remaing scraps, but until then, AI can AT LEAST end those Nigerian Prince emails I keep getting.   Engadget Gmail relies heavily on filtering and machine learning systems to keep spam from reaching a user’s inbox. “We have a very robust spam filter,” Kumaran continued. “It’s something that’s been around since the inception of Gmail, and we’ve evolved that as the space has changed. We had some very early adoption of machine learning and I think it’s been an extremely useful feature for us.” Google furthered the state of the art of spam mitigation this February when it introduced a new filtering system based off the company’s TensorFlow ML library. The filter is built to detect some of the most difficult to spot types of spam including “image-based messages, emails with hidden embedded content, and messages from newly created domains that try to hide a low volume of spammy messages within legitimate traffic,” Kumaran wrote earlier this year. It does so by looking for subtle trends in large scale data sets, basing its judgement of whether or not a message is spam on thousands of individual potential signals. The new system is already spotting and stopping an additional 100 million spam emails everyday from reaching Gmail’s 1.5 billion users.

The UK is making a major push to take the lead in the electric car range and charge race.  Mirror UK Last week, the Faraday Institution – a research charity backed by the UK government – announced £55 million of funding for five battery projects, in a bid to improve the technology that sits at the heart of electric vehicles….. Research has shown that arranging the materials in a structured way can dramatically improve battery performance, but at present there is no mass-manufacturing route to do so. The Nextrode project will investigate new manufacturing methods to create structured electrodes cheaply, and in high manufacturing volumes.  The hope is that this will lead to the development of an electric car battery that can retain enough charge in 6 minutes to travel 150 miles, according to Professor David Greenwood from the University of Warwick, who is also involved in the project.

Using pattern recognition and other skills, AI are improving their science test skills, and they don't have to know a thing about science to do it.  ZDNetZ DNet’s Tiernan Ray explains that researchers at the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence have developed a massive assemblage of machine learning techniques that use probability models of language to ace question-answering on the New York State Regents exam for 8th through 12th grade science.The effort is a technological marvel, but it still doesn’t mean that AI really understands anything about science, per se.

There are women who are in need of a vaginal fluid transplant to help them with bacterial vaginosis.  Scientists are close to making it happen.Doctors In The US Are Developing Vaginal Fluid Transplants And It Is Absolutely As Weird As It Sounds – GraziaExcerpt:Doctors in the US are screening potential donors of vaginal fluid as they work towards transplants to help women who suffer from bacterial vaginosis (BV). The transplant would mean an option besides antibiotics for women who repeatedly suffer with the infection.The research is being conducted after the successful testing of 20 women, which allowed doctors to gain insight into the ideal vaginal fluid donor. Now, after approval from the Food and Drugs Administration (FDA), they hope to find more volunteers to screen and to start offering women with BV the transplants.

A scintillating study from the University of Warwick suggests as much as 99 percent of the space we use on solar panels is just not needed.Discovery challenges accepted rule of organic solar cell design – Phys.orgExcerpt:Scientists at the University of Warwick have discovered that the electrodes in organic solar cells actually only need 1% of their surface area to be electrically conductive to be fully effective, which opens the door to using a range of composite materials at the interface between the electrodes and the light harvesting organic semiconductor layers to improve device performance and reduce cost. The discovery, published today (11 September), is reported in Advanced Functional Materials.The academic lead, Dr. Ross Hatton from the University’s Department of Chemistry, said: “It’s widely assumed that if you want to optimise the performance of organic solar cells you need to maximize the area of the interface between the electrodes and the organic semiconductors. We asked whether that was really true.”The researchers developed a model electrode that they could systematically change the surface area of, and found that when as much as 99% of its surface was electrically insulating the electrode still performs as well as if 100% of the surface was conducting, provided the conducting regions aren’t too far apart.

Malaysia wants to kill smog by creating rain.  At least that's the latest plan....Malaysia To Seed Clouds, Induce Rain As Smog Pollutes Air – NDTVExcerpt:Malaysia prepared to seed clouds after air quality in parts of the country reached unhealthy levels due to smog from forest fires in neighbouring Indonesia, an official said Monday.Smog regularly blankets parts of Southeast Asia during the dry season when burning is used to clear Indonesian land for palm oil, paper plantations and other crops, sparking ire from regional neighbours.In the latest outbreak, parts of Malaysia’s eastern state of Sarawak on Borneo island have been blanketed over the past few days.The pollutant index in some places has reached “very unhealthy levels”, said Gary Theseira, special functions officer with the environment ministry.

SpaceX successfully tests ‘Starhopper’ Mars-colonizing spaceship - RT SpaceX’s prototype for Mars-colonizing spaceship, Starhopper, successfully completed the test flight on Tuesday in Boca Chica, Texas, rising up to 150m, a limit imposed by US Federal Aviation Administration.

BREAKING: India and Russia Ditching The U.S. Dollar – MCSC Network W/ Niko HouseNiko House talks about the ramifications of a Russia-India Trade deal that does away with the US Dollar.