Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your baby-loving Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. We got a teaser about the Omnicopter during Raff D'Andrea's most recent TED Talk, but this dedicated video shows it off much better: Like all the coolest robots, the things it can do look like CGI, right? On July 27, 2016, Michigan-based Vayu, Inc., in collaboration with the Stony Brook University Global Health Institute completed the first ever series of long-range, fully autonomous drone delivery flights with blood and stool samples, setting records in the process.

I was going to start this column with some new productivity figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but I realized that at least half of the readers would quit right there. Productivity is one of those subjects that fascinates economists and bores, or mystifies, almost everyone else. Instead, let's start with a little story. Imagine that it's 1890 and you and a friend have bought a donkey and cart and started a moving company that transports heavy objects, such as sofas and beds. If you work hard, you can manage two deliveries a day, for each of which you charge a price that, if adjusted for inflation, would amount to fifty-five dollars today. Let's say overhead, such as advertising and food for the donkey, comes to ten dollars a day.

China Miéville has long had spiders on the brain. In his breakthrough novel, 2000's "Perdido Street Station," a mysterious, spiderlike being called the Weaver assists a scientist named Isaac who's trying to save the fantastical city of Bas-Lag from a catastrophic infestation. In Miéville's new novella, "The Last Days of New Paris," the streets of Paris in 1950 have gone haywire after the detonation of a reality-altering bomb that brings various Surrealist works to frightening life, including an arachnoid manifestation reminiscent of Odilon Redon's painting "The Smiling Spider." "There's something about the arachnid," Miéville told me recently, on the phone from his home in London. Bataille writes about the spider as an avatar of formlessness, this very, very powerful thing.

Daniel Bartlett thinks nothing of driving halfway across the UK to visit places that aren't really there. A couple of months ago, he made a 500-kilometre round-trip from London to defend an alien portal at the lifeboat station on Cromer Pier, on the east coast of England. In between scoffing a portion of chips and an ice cream, he coordinated with around 50 people at other key coastal positions from Scotland across to the Netherlands. Over the course of an afternoon, they took control of the North Sea, turning it from blue to green. Barlett has been playing Ingress for two and a half years.

Are you better at science than the Donald? These 20 questions will help you find out! This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Every election cycle, science gets the short end of the stick. So a collective of scientists--56 scientific organizations representing 10 million scientists and engineers and spearheaded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science--tries to engage them in a debate by compiling a list of science-based questions, soliciting answers, and publishing them.

To mark the 47th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon-landing mission, the Smithsonian has revealed a stunning high resolution 3D model of the command module'Columbia,' the spacecraft that carried astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin'Buzz' Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon. The stunning virtual 3-D model that will allow the public a look inside the car-sized Apollo 11 command module. As one of the most sophisticated scans ever made of a historic artifact, it employed seven different scanning technologies to capture nearly 1 trillion high-resolution measurements producing more than a terabyte of compressed data resulting in a highly detailed master model. To mark the 47th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon-landing mission, the Smithsonian has revealed a stunning high resolution 3D model of the command module'Columbia,' the spacecraft that carried astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin'Buzz' Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon. As one of the most sophisticated scans ever made of a historic artifact, researchers at the Smithsonian employed seven different scanning technologies to capture nearly 1 trillion high-resolution measurements, producing more than a terabyte of compressed data.

Rare images of a wildcat on the brink of extinction have been caught by animal protection volunteers in Siberia. The endangered Pallas's wildcats have been hunted by poachers for their fur which can be sold on the black market to be made into mittens. Native to remote regions of southern Siberia, as well as Central Asia and China, they are seldom seen, and known for their reclusive and solitary lives. 'They are secretive and do not like to be seen, making these images rather special,' reported The Siberian Times. This cat was caught on camera a whisker away from an animal camera trap as it surveyed the scene in the Altai Nature Reserve in mountainous southern Siberia.

It is a terrifying vision of the future of battle. Called RoBattle, this heavy duty combat and support robot is strapped with a'robotic kit' consisting of vehicle control, navigation, RT mapping and autonomy, sensors and mission payloads. In addition to ambushing and attacking on command, this combat ready platform, developed by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), can raise its body four feet in the air to tackle obstacles or crouch down 23 inches to hide from enemies. It may be focused on the sky, but Israel Aerospace Industries has stepped down on land to develop the newest member of its unmanned ground robotic systems family. RoBattle is a combat and support robot equipped with a'robotic kit' of vehicle control, navigation, RT mapping and autonomy, sensors and mission payloads RoBattle, is an semi-autonomous combat and support robot designed to assist ground soldiers in the field.

Apps like Tinder were designed to make the process of dating quicker and more efficient, by only matching people with other who are interested in them to save people from rejection. But new evidence suggests the apps have created a different kind of problem – men play Tinder like a game, swiping right to everyone just to see who has'liked' them. This can be frustrating for women, who are pickier about who they match with, since men they are paired with are less likely to reply to their messages, a new study has found. Evidence shows people on Tinder are not motivated enough to speak to someone they match with. Both men and women are unlikely to message even after mutually liking another profile, a new study has found.

About halfway through a particularly tense game of Go held in Seoul, South Korea, between Lee Sedol, one of the best players of all time, and AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence created by Google, the AI program made a mysterious move that demonstrated an unnerving edge over its human opponent. On move 37, AlphaGo chose to put a black stone in what seemed, at first, like a ridiculous position. It looked certain to give up substantial territory--a rookie mistake in a game that is all about controlling the space on the board. Two television commentators wondered if they had misread the move or if the machine had malfunctioned somehow. In fact, contrary to any conventional wisdom, move 37 would enable AlphaGo to build a formidable foundation in the center of the board. The Google program had effectively won the game using a move that no human would've come up with. AlphaGo's victory is particularly impressive because the ancient game of Go is often looked at as a test of intuitive intelligence. The rules are quite simple. Two players take turns putting black or white stones at the intersection of horizontal and vertical lines on a board, trying to surround their opponent's pieces and remove them from play.