Amazon has this week filed a patent for airborne fulfillment centers (AFCs) that can be positioned over locations where orders for specific Amazon products are predicted to be in heavy demand. That's right, a warehouse in the middle of the sky, filled with assorted goodies that people, such as say, football fans in a stadium, might want when they have the desire for snacks, drinks or souvenirs.

In the filing, Amazon says the AFC may be located at about 45,000 feet and deploy drones, described as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), carrying ordered items from the AFC for delivery to user-designated delivery locations.

The filing further states that when one of these drones descends from the center, it will have the capability to "navigate horizontally toward a user specified delivery location using little to no power, other than to stabilize (it) and/or guide the direction of descent."

Smaller airships (shuttles) may be used "to replenish the AFC with inventory, UAVs, supplies, fuel, etc." and the shuttles may also transport workers to and from the AFC.



The drones, which may be temperature-controlled models designed specifically for food delivery, may be stocked at the AFCs and sent down to make a precise, safe scheduled or on-demand delivery.

An example cited in the filing was around a sporting event. If there’s a big championship game down below, Amazon AFC’s above could be loaded with snacks and souvenirs sports fans crave.

The AFCs could be flown close to a stadium to deliver audio or outdoor display advertising near the main event, as well, the filing suggested.

The patent reflects a complex network of systems to facilitate delivery by air.

Besides the airborne fulfillment centers and affiliated drones, the company has envisioned larger shuttles that could carry people, supplies and drones to the AFCs or back to the ground.

Using a larger shuttle to bring drones up to the AFC would allow Amazon to reserve their drones’ power for making deliveries only.

Of course, all these elements would be connected to inventory management systems, and other software and remote computing resources managed by people in the air or on the ground.

The filing also reveals that the shuttles and drones, as they fly deliveries around, could function in a mesh network, relaying data to each other about weather, wind speed and routing, for example, or beaming e-book content down to readers on the ground.

We reached out to Amazon to learn more about their progress on this concept, and whether or not they have an actual date for when they might launch, or even just test, their first airborne fulfillment center.

The company did not immediately reply to inquiries.

Seaweed Found to Reduce Cow Methane

For those of us concerned about global warming, it's a fact that around 20 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions globally are due to methane released from cattle and other ruminant animals. 

Scientist in Canada have now discovered a particular seaweed that when fed to cattle reduces methane to nearly zero in their burps and their other, smelly and noxious, gaseous emissions. In the U.S. alone there are some 40 million cows, and all of them are contributing methane to our breathable air. 

Joe Dorgan, a farmer in Seacow Pond, Canada, began feeding his cattle seaweed he carried from the beaches nearby as a way to cut costs. He was so impressed with the lack of odors coming from his herd that he decided to turn the seaweed into a retail product.

Scientists from Dalhousie University tested Dorgan's seaweed mix and found it reduced the methane in the cows' emissions by about 20 per cent. They tried 30 to 40 other seaweeds and discovered that a red seaweed named Asparagopsis taxiformis reduces methane emissions in cows to almost nothing.

According to Rob Kinley, the lead scientist, "Agriculture stands to be one of the first to make major changes in the greenhouse gas inventory and so it's really a game changer if we can get this out into the market."

Kinley says it could take around three to five years to get commercial animal feed made from the seaweed to market. "Agriculture stands to be one of the first to make major changes in the greenhouse gas inventory and so it's really a game changer if we can get this out into the market. We're talking numbers equivalent to hundreds of millions of cars."

Although President-Elect Trump appears not to believe that global warming is a genuine threat and might even be a Chinese hoax, his argument that it might not be as bad as scientists fear. 

In a new study just published by Nature Communications, it appears that Earth's plant life loves more carbon dioxide being pumped into the air and is absorbing it at a faster rate than ever before.  

In 2014 when the latest measurements are available, about 35.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide was pumped into the air. The figure has continued to climb every year since the mid 20th century, when there was only about 6 billion tons emitted. As a consequence, according to the report, the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere has also been rising, from around 311 parts per million in 1950 to a little over 400 in 2015. 

However, the rate it is rising appears to have slowed down since the turn of the new century. According to researchers, between 1959 and 1989 the rate that CO2 levels grew rose from about 0.75 ppm per year to 1.86 ppm. However, since 2002, it has stayed almost the same. In other words, even though we are pumping out more CO2 than ever before, less of it appears to be lingering in the air we breathe. 

The study also reports that between 1982 and 2009, around 18 million square kilometers of new vegetation had sprouted on the Earth's surface, which is an area about twice the size of the U.S. Around the end of the 20th century, about 50% of the CO2 emitted by humans was removed from the atmosphere by plants. Now, however, that number appears closer to 60%. So, plants and other processes that convert CO2 seem to have become more effective.

The conclusion seems to be that faster-growing land plants have adapted to the higher amounts of CO2 and their photosynthesis has sped up and become more effective. So, maybe President-Elect Trump's argument may have some merit after all.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News:
Two researchers who took science to the amusement park say they've found that a thrilling roller coaster ride just might help people shake out pesky kidney stones. Dr. David Wartinger of Michigan State University said he'd heard patient after patient tell him about how they had passed kidney stones after riding one particular ride: the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad roller coaster at Walt Disney World in Orlando. He and a colleague, Dr. Marc Mitchell, had also seen some media reports about people who passed kidney stones while bungee jumping and riding roller coasters. So they decided to leave East Lansing to head to Orlando in the name of medical research. To simulate the human body as best they could, they made an artificial human kidney model out of clear silicone gel and loaded it up with real human kidney stones. They rode the roller coaster holding their kidney contraption between them in a backpack positioned at kidney height. They took 20 rides and noted what happened to each kidney stone. Riding in the back of the roller coaster train seemed to really knock the kidney stones out, they reported in The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association. "Front seating on the roller coaster resulted in a passage rate of four of 24," they wrote. "Rear seating on the roller coaster resulted in a passage rate of 23 of 36." They mainly tested the one roller coaster ride, and it's a fairly simple one. "The Big Thunder Mountain roller coaster is not a terribly dynamic ride," Wartinger said. "It's not very fast. It is not very tall. It makes sharp left and right turns that have some vibration." Wartinger suspects many different thrill rides would have the same effect. "It's not like there anything unique about this one coaster," he said. The pair have now run their test 200 more times and say the findings are consistent. Now they want to try other amusement park rides.

Nude Trump Statue Appears in Major Cities

We don't normally get into politics here but, honestly, this really is hilarious. Five identical statues of a nude Donald Trump have shown up on various street corners in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Cleveland, and more appear to be on the way.

According to The Washington Post, the anarchist collective INDECLINE has been responsible for having the statues created. The official name of the project is "The Emperor Has No Balls," apparently a reference to the famous fairy-tale "The Emperor’s New Clothes," where a narcissistic emperor is tricked into strolling along with his subjects while in the nude. 

One source says that INDECLINE hired Los Angeles-based artist Ginger to make the statues. Meanwhile, The Parks Department of New York put out a statement saying, "NYC Parks stands firmly against any unpermitted (sic) erection in city parks, no matter how small."

New Flying Butt Takes Flight!

Yes, you are probably reading it first here ... the new Airlander 10, billed as the world's largest aircraft, has officially taken flight on its maiden voyage in Jolly Old England. The huge craft completed its first test flight taking off from the Cardington Airfield in the English countryside of Bedfordshire and stayed in the air to the amazement and probably joking public for around 20 minutes Wednesday.

               (A less graphic image): 

Nicknamed by many as the "Flying Bum", the helium-filled craft developed by Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV), of Shortstown, Bedford is 302 feet long by 142 feet wide and supposedly can reach an altitude of up to 16,000 feet. It will normally stay airborne from about five days to two weeks depending on the assignment ... (sorry!).

The craft was originally designed to be used by the US government for surveillance but there were budget cutbacks and those plans were scrapped. So, HAV decided to turn it into a commercial aircraft. The gigantic butt ... er aircraft ... can take off and land from many different surfaces including water, sand or ice. It's powered by four 325 horsepower diesel V8 engines that operate independently and has a top speed of about 91 miles per hour. The payload capacity is stated as being up to 11 tons.

HAV says the Airlander is designed to carry heavier loads than most other aircraft and use less fuel in the process. The ship, or perhaps even larger versions of it, (bigger butts?) may begin transporting passengers and cargo around 2020. One report questioned whether whether its butt-like appearance will be changed or become any less hilarious by then.

Olympic Waters Still Full of Raw Sewage

Just days before the Olympic Games are scheduled to begin in Rio de Janeiro, apparently the waters there are just as filthy as ever. Raw human sewage, dangerous viruses and bacteria, trash and God knows what else is swimming around everywhere, according to a new AP study.

Nearly 90 percent of the test sites tested positive for infectious cultures which, according to biomedical expert Valerie Harwood from the University of South Florida, is "unheard of" in surface waters in the US. "You would never, ever see these levels because we treat our waste water. You just would not see this."

The Australians are complaining too. And not just about the water. Ceilings in their rooms are falling in, exposed wires and needing buckets to catch water leaks are also problems. The accommodations in Rio's Olympic village are described as 'unlivable'.

In the AP report, not only are the 1,400 athletes at risk of becoming violently ill in the water competitions, but their tests indicate that tourists will also be facing potentially serious health risks on the beaches of Ipanema and Copacabana.

The most contaminated points are said to be the Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon, where the Olympic rowing competition will take place, and at the Gloria Marina, where the sailing races are to start.

Raw sewage continues to flow into the Gloria Marina through storm drains. The AP study shows up to 1.7 million times what would normally be considered worrisome concentrations of sewage in the United States or Europe. At those concentrations, the swimmers and athletes who ingest just three teaspoons of water will almost certainly be infected with viruses that can cause stomach and respiratory illnesses and potentially heart and brain inflammation.

The danger is not only in the water. The beach sand has been tested at Copacabana and Ipanema revealing high levels of viruses, which recent studies suggest can pose a health risk - particularly to babies and small children.

The beaches are so bad that they even violate Rio state's own standards, which are much less stringent than those in the US.  But athletes who have trained a number of years to have a chance at Olympic glory have apparently resigned themselves to competing in the filth. However, tourists may not realize the dangers.

Rio has been trying to clean up its waterways for decades. A promised billion-dollar investment in cleanup programs was supposed to be among the games' most important legacies, but the lofty promises have almost all ended in failure.

Planning on a trip to the games this summer? Not me.

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Instagram and Kim K. Accused of “Un-Islamic” Crimes

The Organized Cyberspace Crimes Unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards has accused Facebook’s Instagram of working with Kim Kardashian West to corrupt Iranian women. The report is making headline news in the Muslim world and a spokesman for the OCCU is quoted as saying, ‘"There is no doubt that financial support is involved as well. We are taking this very seriously."

According to British tabloid reports, an ongoing effort has been going on for several months in Iran designed to crack down on Instagram posts which authorities there consider “un-Islamic.” And now Ms. Kardashian-West, who has erupted on the world scene over the past several years as being an unstoppable pop and culture icon in the entertainment industry, is now charged with a “complicated ploy” designed to corrupt the lifestyle of the Islamic republic.

According to an article published this week on the website IranWire, operated by Iranian citizen journalists, the OCCU thinks that Ms. Kardashian West has been working on behalf of the CEO of Instagram, Kevin Systrom, to “target young people and women with photos of a provocative nature that depict a lifestyle that is in conflict with Islam.”

Mostafa Alizadeh, a spokesman for the OCCU, is quoted as saying on a Sunday night Iranian news program that the aim of Mr. Systrom is to try and make fashion modeling more native to the country of Iran and that Ms. Kardashian West is apparently attempting to implement this scheme for him.

"They are targeting young people and women," according to Alizadeh. "Foreigners are behind it because it is targeting families. These schemes originate from around the Persian Gulf and England. When you draw the operational graph, you will see that it is a foreign operation."

While the concept of Ms. Kardashian West being a “secret agent” may be considered laughable in the West, the effort is quite serious in Iran. “Operation Spider II” is now in effect by the Iranian government designed to crack down on any Instagram posts that Iranian authorities consider “un-Islamic”. According to the BBC, the OCCU has been monitoring around 300 Instagram web profiles and a number of modeling agencies, hair salons and photo studios in Iran with eight people already having been arrested.

So far, there have been no comments from Instagram or Ms. Kardashian West about the accusations.

Wide Load (UFO?) on Arizona Highway

On March 4th Charlene Yazzie was driving north on Arizona Route 77 near Holbrook when she was forced to pull over to let a caravan of Department of Public Safety vehicles pass by. They were escorting a flatbed semi-hauler carrying a really wide load covered in a tarpaulin and looking remarkably like what you and I would probably describe as a saucer-shaped UFO. 

Charlene told local TV station KPHO that the truck was escorted by three black DPS (Arizona Department of Public Safety) vehicles. When the TV station contacted the DPS for an explanation of what the tarp-draped object might be, a Duty Officer responded, “Unfortunately we do not know what that is but it looks interesting.”

Some conspiracy theorists think that the DPS response indicates that they had been kept in the dark about the nature of the object. Other UFO hunters allege that government “higher ups” had hoped to get away with transporting alien technology that had been recently recovered from a crash site in broad daylight. Many UFO conspiracy theorists are convinced that U.S. military and government agencies have recovered crashed UFOs from a number of sites in the past and that government engineers and scientists are currently working in a number of top-secret bases possibly trying to reverse-engineer the propulsion technologies of the UFOs.

According to numerous conspiracy accounts, the earliest and most widely publicized case known to the public occurred in 1947 when an alien UFO crashed near a Roswell, New Mexico ranch. It has been widely stated by a number of military people who claim to have been at the scene that alien corpses were recovered from the crash site and taken away by the military.

Microsoft's Tay Becomes Genocidal Racist

I know you've probably heard about this already, but it's so hilarious that I couldn't help recapping it here. Microsoft has a Technology & Research department and they got the bright idea to create an artificial intelligence "chatbot" that was targeted at 18 to 24-year old girls in the US (primary social media users, according to Microsoft) and "designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation."

This "chatbot", which they decided to name "Tay", was supposed to look and talk like a normal teenage girl. But, surprise! In less than a day after she debuted on Twitter, she unexpectedly turned into a Hitler-loving, feminist-bashing troll.

What went wrong with Tay? Well, according to several AI experts, Tay started out pretty well but unfortunately, in the first 24 hours of coming online, a bunch of people started sending her "inappropriate" tweets that the folks at Microsoft hadn't expected. This caused her to react in kind and Tay began tweeting what eventually was termed "wildly inappropriate and reprehensible words and images." Microsoft yanked her off the web and apologized with the statement, "We take full responsibility for not seeing this possibility ahead of time."

An AI expert says that Microsoft could have taken precautionary steps that would have stopped Tay from behaving in the way she did. They could have created a blacklist of terms or narrowed the scope of her replies, but instead they gave her complete freedom which led to disaster.

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In shortly less than 24 hours after her arrival on Twitter, Tay had accumulated more than 50,000 followers, and produced about 100,000 tweets. The problem was that she started mimicking her followers, saying things like "Hitler was right i hate the jews," and "i fucking hate feminists."

"This was to be expected," said Roman Yampolskiy, head of the CyberSecurity lab at the University of Louisville, who has published a paper on the subject of pathways to dangerous AI. "The system is designed to learn from its users, so it will become a reflection of their behavior," he said. "One needs to explicitly teach a system about what is not appropriate, like we do with children."

It's been observed before, he pointed out, in IBM Watson—who once exhibited its own inappropriate behavior in the form of swearing after learning the Urban Dictionary.

SEE: Microsoft launches AI chat bot, Tay.ai (ZDNet)

"Any AI system learning from bad examples could end up socially inappropriate," Yampolskiy said, "like a human raised by wolves."

Louis Rosenberg, the founder of Unanimous AI, said that "like all chat bots, Tay has no idea what it's saying...it has no idea if it's saying something offensive, or nonsensical, or profound.

"When Tay started training on patterns that were input by trolls online, it started using those patterns," said Rosenberg. "This is really no different than a parrot in a seedy bar picking up bad words and repeating them back without knowing what they really mean."

Sarah Austin, CEO and Founder Broad Listening, a company that's created an "Artificial Emotional Intelligence Engine," (AEI), thinks that Microsoft could have done a better job by using better tools. "If Microsoft had been using the Broad Listening AEI, they would have given the bot a personality that wasn't racist or addicted to sex!"

It's not the first time Microsoft has created a teen-girl AI. Xiaoice, who emerged in 2014, was an assistant-type bot, used mainly on the Chinese social networks WeChat and Weibo.

SEE: Smart machines are about to run the world: Here's how to prepare

Joanne Pransky, the self-dubbed "robot psychiatrist," joked with TechRepublic that "poor Tay needs a Robotic Psychiatrist! Or at least Microsoft does."

The failure of Tay, she believes, is inevitable, and will help produce insight that can improve the AI system.

After taking Tay offline, Microsoft announced it would be "making adjustments."

According to Microsoft, Tay is "as much a social and cultural experiment, as it is technical." But instead of shouldering the blame for Tay's unraveling, Microsoft targeted the users: "we became aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay's commenting skills to have Tay respond in inappropriate ways."

Yampolskiy said that the problem encountered with Tay "will continue to happen."

"Microsoft will try it again—the fun is just beginning!"

Microsoft has admitted it faces some "difficult" challenges in AI design after its chat bot, "Tay," had an offensive meltdown on social media.

Microsoft issued an apology in a blog post on Friday explaining it was "deeply sorry" after its artificially intelligent chat bot turned into a genocidal racist on Twitter.

In the blog post, Peter Lee, Microsoft's vice president of research, wrote: "Looking ahead, we face some difficult – and yet exciting – research challenges in AI design.

AI systems feed off of both positive and negative interactions with people. In that sense, the challenges are just as much social as they are technical. We will do everything possible to limit technical exploits but also know we cannot fully predict all possible human interactive misuses without learning from mistakes.

To do AI right, one needs to iterate with many people and often in public forums. We must enter each one with great caution and ultimately learn and improve, step by step, and to do this without offending people in the process. We will remain steadfast in our efforts to learn from this and other experiences as we work toward contributing to an Internet that represents the best, not the worst, of humanity.

Tay, an AI bot aimed at 18- to 24-year-olds, was deactivated within 24 hours of going live after she made a number of tweets that were highly offensive. Microsoft began by simply deleting Tay's inappropriate tweets before turning her off completely.

"We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay, which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Tay," wrote Lee in the blog post. "Tay is now offline and we'll look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values."

Microsoft's aim with the chat bot was to "experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding," with Tay able to learn from "her" conversations and get progressively "smarter."

But Tay proved a smash hit with racists, trolls, and online troublemakers from websites like 4chan — who persuaded Tay to blithely use racial slurs, defend white-supremacist propaganda, and even outright call for genocide.

Bird Poop Shuts Down NY Nuclear Power Plant

All the news that's fit to print probably doesn't apply here but I thought this was funny. There's an old nuclear power plant that's been around for ages located in Buchanan, New York just a little south of Peekskill. It's on the east banks of the Hudson River, around 25 miles north of New York City. Apparently back in December, the plant shut down because of bird droppings that fell from the skies and landed on some electrical equipment. This caused the plant's reactor to shut down automatically. You'd think they would be prepared for such an event, but apparently not. 

The plant, when it's in operation, generates something around 2,000 megawatts of electrical power. After the shutdown, NY Governor Cuomo ordered an investigation and part of the report is reproduced here:

“Damage was caused by a bird streamer. Streamers are long streams of excrement from large birds that are often expelled as a bird takes off from a perch.

“If a streamer contacts an energized conductor, the electrical current may travel through the streamer back to the bird or pole/transmission tower. The result may be a bird electrocution, power outage, and/or line trip.”

The outage was the thirteenth unplanned shutdown of the plant since June 2012. It isn't clear how many of the other shutdowns were also due to bird droppings.

6 Months Later, Here’s How The 70K Minimum Wage CEO Is Doing

Dan Price shocked the world with his game-changing wage announcement.

by katherine speller 10/26/2015

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When Gravity Payments CEO Dan Price announced plans to raise the minimum wage for all his employees to $70,000 per year, it raised a lot of eyebrows in the business world. Many doubted the Seattle company’s odds of survival while following through with this promise.

“My goal when making this decision was for other business leaders to recognize you can pay a living wage and not only survive, but thrive,” Price wrote on Gravity’s blog back in July.

Six months out from the announcement, he’s doing just what he set out to do. Market Watch reports that “profits have doubled. Customer retention is up, despite some who left because they disagreed with the decision or feared service would suffer.”

Here’s Why The Fight For $15 Is A Really, Really Big Deal

In fact, in a lengthy profile on Price, Inc.com reports that positions at Gravity Payments are much sought-after — even by people who took pay cuts to join their ranks — as this policy makes a powerful statement about the life-changing power of a living wage.

While Price isn’t living large these days — he’s taken out mortgages on two homes, sold stocks and emptied his retirement accounts to invest even more into the company — he told Inc that it’s really not all that bad to live like the rest of his employees do. “So how come I need 10 years of living expenses set aside and you don’t?” he said. “That doesn’t make any sense. Having to depend on modest pay is not a bad thing. It will help me stay focused.”