These two mega-trends are on a collision course and it has the rental-car industry shaking in its boots. The entire car rental industry could soon be upended as autonomous vehicles change the entire calculus of car ownership over the next ten years. Why would a consumer rent a car if the cost of ordering a self-driving car via Uber is 1/10 of today's price? Which means the rental-car industry's 75 billion B2C and B2B businesses are about to take a serious hit. However, that doesn't mean every company in the rental-car industry is doomed.

Four people were killed, including two children. "We were looking into all these different stories, like the psychology of the drone pilot, all the crazy, messed-up stuff that surrounds it," says Killbox programmer Albert Elwin on the IndieCade show floor in Los Angeles. "It's all really dark and depressing -- it's absolutely in some ways a difficult project to work on because you get kind of consumed by the reality of it." Since 2004, the US has conducted more than 400 drone strikes across Pakistan alone that have killed up to 4,000 people, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Hard statistics don't exist in the world of UAV warfare, but the Bureau estimates between 423 and 965 civilians have been killed in unmanned strikes on Pakistan, including as many as 207 children.

Like humans, robots that are working hard generate a lot of heat, a byproduct that adds stress to their systems and limits the amount of time they can be active before they need to recharge. One of the things that makes humans such good distance runners is our ability to sweat, a liquid discharge that helps to cool our bodies as it evaporates. Researchers at the University of Tokyo's JSK lab decided to borrow from that behavior to try and improve robotic performance, building a metal frame that could be filled with water which would seep out when it was in motion. The team created custom "bones" by 3D printing porous aluminum. Water moves through these channels in predictable ways, and the "sweat glands" are positioned near motors, the pieces that typically overheat during strenuous activity.

The airline is the sixth corporate backer of the startup hot house created by renowned entrepreneurs Brent Hoberman and Henry Lane Fox - both of Lastminute.com fame - with the ambitious goal of creating 200 successful startups over the next five years. That will include investing in and helping scale five early stage startups each year, as well as co-founding two companies itself. "Connecting the talented easyJet team with the next generation of disruptive entrepreneurs will only continue to drive fresh thinking and uncover new opportunities," said easyJet chief executive Dame Carolyn McCall. Hoberman added: "We are confident that together we can support the next generation of innovators in travel leveraging digital scale, data, personalisation, virtual reality, artificial intelligence (AI), ecommerce breakthroughs and fintech." It joins five other corporate backers working with Founders Factory, including Aviva for fintech, L'Oreal for beauty technology and a deal with China's CSC inked just last week to foster startups working on AI. "easyJet coming into Founders Factory as our sixth and final corporate investor represents a critical milestone," said Henry Lane Fox. "With some of the leading brands and audience owners in the world as investors, we are able to execute on our vision of exploiting new emerging technologies to redefine industries." It has also done deals with Holtzbrinck publishing group in the area of education and the Guardian Media Group in media.

Yet, while the world is busy watching Silicon Valley, these relatively obscure spots in the US and Europe are quietly building the infrastructure for innovation ecosystems that will drive the next technological revolutions. In 2008 General Electric opened a state-of-the-art jet engine component factory in the small Mississippi town, followed by another one in Ellisville in 2013. Both towns are close to technical universities stocked with researchers that specialize in new materials for the next-generation ultralight and silent jet engines. This partnership is crucial for innovation. As GE CEO Jeff Immelt wrote in the Harvard Business Review, "By partnering with Mississippi State University, we have developed a highly sophisticated proprietary process for manufacturing components made of carbon-fiber composites."

The team behind Roborace, the planned support series for the FIA Formula E Championship that'll race electric self-driving cars, scheduled its car's debut for Formula E's season opener in Hong Kong last weekend. But the car didn't make it to the track, and the team documented all of its struggles on video. When originally announced, Roborace was set to begin for the 2016-2017 race season that Formula E kicked off in Hong Kong. The series markets itself as the first driverless electric racing series, and it will use artificial intelligence in its spec race cars. Strategy will play out through algorithms programmed in by engineers, and they're the real competitors here.

During April of this year, I submitted my Masters' thesis proposal to the ACL Student Research Workshop at the prodding of my thesis adviser, Ms. Charibeth Cheng. Since the main purpose of the submission was simply to get reviewer feedback, I totally forgot about it afterwards and went on with my life. Fast forward to June, I happily awoke to good news sitting in my e-mail: my paper had been accepted! I was going to Berlin and attend a top-tier Natural Language Processing (NLP) conference participated in by Facebook, Google, and Amazon! Immediately after the initial elation though, a million worries started to flood my head.

As we exercise, our bodies can produce a lot of heat as our muscles convert chemical energy into mechanical energy. To keep moving effectively during such conditions, we produce sweat to cool ourselves down. As the water in our sweat evaporates, it takes excess heat with it, allowing us to keep moving without overheating. A team from the University of Tokyo has created a robot that can exercise and cool off in a similar way, inspired by human sweat. The new robot is named Kengoro.

Tesla has reportedly been told to stop advertising an "autopilot" function on its cars after the term was deemed to be misleading. German transport regulator KBA wrote to the company after the feature came under scrutiny following two fatal crashes. Questions have been raised over the system after fatal crashes in northern China and Florida. There was also an incident in Germany in which a Tesla electric car crashed into a tourist bus while on autopilot. "In order to prevent misunderstandings and false expectations from clients, we are asking that the misleading term'Autopilot' no longer be used in advertisements for the system," KBA said, according to the Local.

A new age is dawning. Whether it is a wonderful one or a terrible one remains to be seen. Look around and the signs of dizzying technological progress are difficult to miss. Driverless cars and drones, not long ago the stuff of science fiction, are now oddities that can occasionally be spotted in the wild and which will soon be a commonplace in cities around the world. With a few flicks of a finger, we can use our phones to order up a meal, or a car, or a translation for a waiter's query in a foreign country. Gadgets such as the Amazon Echo are finding their way into living rooms, where they sit listening, ready to comply with a voice command. Just a few years ago, one could dismiss the digital age as consisting of little more than social networks and cat videos; no longer.