The Pentagon has sent new guidance to the armed services that lays out the military's authority to disable or shoot down any drone that violates airspace restrictions over a U.S. base and is deemed a security risk. The Pentagon has sent new guidance to the armed services that lays out the military's authority to disable or shoot down any drone that violates airspace restrictions over a U.S. base and is deemed a security risk. Jeff Davis told Pentagon reporters Monday that a classified policy was approved in July. On Friday, additional public information was sent to military bases around the country so officials can alert their communities about the restrictions and the actions the military can take. He said the new policy provides details about the actions the military can take to stop any threat, including destroying or seizing any unmanned aircraft -- including the smaller ones that the general public can easily buy -- that is flown over a base.

When Yoichi Masuda set out to design a new legged robot, he found inspiration in the Martian Tripods from the classic sci-fi novel "The War of the Worlds" by H.G. Wells. A three-legged configuration seems to offer some advantages when it comes to walking and balancing, and Masuda became curious about the absence of three-legged animals in nature. Are there evolutionary factors that explain why we haven't seen any? And if three-legged creatures existed, could there be a universal principle of walking locomotion, common for bipeds, tripeds, and quadrupeds? To explore those questions, Masuda and his colleagues at Osaka University built a three-legged robot named Martian.

Genes carry the information that make you you. So it's fitting that, when sequenced and stored in a computer, your genome takes up gobs of memory--up to 150 gigabytes. Multiply that across all the people who have gotten sequenced, and you're looking at some serious storage issues. If that's not enough, mining those genomes for useful insight means comparing them all to each other, to medical histories, and to the millions of scientific papers about genetics. Sorting all that out is a perfect task for artificial intelligence.

Every industry is inching towards automation and the insurance industry is no exception. According to a white paper titled "2017 Future of Claims Study" published by the legal research firm Lexis Nexis, insurance claims are being increasingly processed using drones, artificial intelligence and app-based interfaces as opposed to sending field agents to examine such claims. The study was conducted using a sample size of 24 insurance executives and their opinions on automation in insurance. The push towards automation is largely driven by customers' need for faster and more convenient processing of claims. " While there hasn't yet been a complete shift to Virtual Claims handling, carriers who want to remain competitive will need to make the move to virtual and consider touchless processing if customer preferences are any indication," the study says.

August is supposed to be a slow news month. People plan summer beach vacations on this presumption. Hackers, though, apparently hate sun and sand because this past week has been incredibly active on the security news front. WIRED broke the scoop of leaked audio from Jared Kushner's welcome conversation with west wing interns, which revealed he has a less than nuanced grasp of the details of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict–a global problem he's been taxed with fixing. Making the nightmares of Amazon Echo owners everywhere come true, hackers turned one of those devices into a wiretap.

You already know what all of your friends are eating, so you might as well know how to make it, too. You already know what all of your friends are eating, so you might as well know how to make it, too. When someone posts a photo of food on social media, do you get cranky? Is it because you just don't care what other people are eating? Or is it because they're enjoying an herb-and-garlic crusted halibut at a seaside restaurant while you sit at your computer with a slice of two-day-old pizza?

Amazon has a problem, and that problem is humans. Amazon needs humans, lots of them. But humans, as we all know, are the most unreasonable part of any business, constantly demanding things like lights and air. So Amazon has turned to robots (over 100,000 of them) for doing tasks like moving things around in a warehouse. But it's proving to be much more difficult to get the robots to do some other tasks.