In December, Amazon announced that it intended to deliver packages to customers using drones. But its "Amazon Prime Air" initiative, revealed on US current affairs show 60 Minutes, was widely ridiculed for being an over-hyped announcement with little to show for it. This summer, Google demonstrated its own drone-based delivery service, using a fixed-wing aircraft to deliver packages including chocolate bars, dog treats and cattle vaccines to farmers in the Australian outback. But now, German delivery firm DHL has beaten the tech firms to the post, announcing a regular drone delivery service for the first time, nine months after it launched its "parcelcopter" research project in December 2013. The service will use an autonomous quadcopter to deliver small parcels to the German island of Juist, a sandbar island 12km into the North Sea from the German coast, inhabited by 2,000 people.

Examples include creating systems which respond in an emotionally-aware way to the user, systems which modify their behaviour in response to affective cues, et cetera. Examples include how emotion might be added to virtual environments, the effect of affect on computer-mediated learning environments or collaborative computer games. Examples include attempts to add emotions to AI-systems, attempts to simulate emotions in computers, systems that are inspired by the physiological basis of emotion, studies which aim to understand the role that affective processes play in reasoning, and computational slants on theories of emotion. In particular studies which use computer simulation to understand affective processes. Examples include creating systems which respond in an emotionally-aware way to the user, systems which modify their behaviour in response to affective cues, et cetera.

In a demonstration conducted this fall in the lower Chesapeake Bay, a fleet of small, human-free boats collectively patrolled a harbor, detected intruders, and even chased them away from the area they were protecting ... The new exercise highlighted the progress the vessels have made: expanding their coverage area, collaborating on strategy, improving tactical maneuvering, and getting better at spotting hostile parties.

Autonomous vehicles have infiltrated much of the military, from airborne surveillance to all manner of ground-based operations. But the Navy remains a mostly human-controlled operation--with the demand for robotic tech focused on conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, it simply hasn't trickled down to aquatic operations yet. But the Office of Naval Research thinks autonomous boats can have a major impact on the military's ocean-going efficiency and effectiveness. In a demonstration conducted this fall in the lower Chesapeake Bay, a fleet of small, human-free boats collectively patrolled a harbor, detected intruders, and even chased them away from the area they were protecting. The Navy first demonstrated the swarm in 2014, when the vessels were tasked with protecting a single ship.

MOSCOW – Search teams on Wednesday recovered another flight recorder from a military plane that crashed in the Black Sea, killing all 92 aboard, the Defense Ministry said. The first flight recorder was found the previous day and experts have started analyzing its data to determine the cause of the crash. The Tu-154 of the Russian Defense Ministry crashed into the sea early Sunday, two minutes after taking off in good weather from the city of Sochi. It was carrying members of the Alexandrov Ensemble, widely known as the Red Army Choir, to a New Year's concert at a Russian military base in Syria. The Defense Ministry said 15 bodies and 239 body fragments have been recovered from the crash site. It previously said 17 bodies had been found.

While the US Navy's new state-of-the-art USS Zumwalt destroyer struggles to remain functional, the service branch's R&D department has been busy investigating cutting-edge tech at a much smaller scale. Back in October, the Office of Naval Research (OCR) demonstrated the harbor defense capabilities of a group of prototype small autonomous boats, aka "swarmbots," in Chesapeake Bay. The ONR used four rigid hull inflatable boats (RHIB) -- think of the larger soldier-ferrying Zodiacs -- to show off the drone squad's ability to patrol, investigate approaching unknown crafts and relay that information back to a human supervisor. Using autonomous vehicles for dull yet important tasks such as harbor defense is cheaper than using human crews, especially since some of the drone tech used in the demo is off-the-shelf. The ONR's autonomous system, Control Architecture for Robotic Agent Command and Sensing (CARACaS), was first demonstrated in RHIBs back in 2014, according to the department's press release.

It had always been Katherine Goble's great talent to be in the right place at the right time. In August 1952, 12 years after leaving graduate school to have her first child, that right place was in Marion, Virginia, at the wedding of her husband, Jimmy Goble's, little sister Patricia. Pat, a vivacious college beauty queen just two months graduated from Virginia State College, was marrying her college sweetheart, a young army corporal named Walter Kane. Jimmy's other sister and brother-in-law, Margaret and Eric Epps, had journeyed from Newport News, and the newlyweds planned to accompany the Eppses back to the coast, hitching a ride to their honeymoon at Hampton's segregated Bay Shore Beach resort. "Why don't y'all come home with us too?" Eric asked Katherine. "I can get Snook a job at the shipyard," he said, using Jimmy's family nickname. "In fact, I can get both of you jobs." There's a government facility in Hampton that's hiring black women, Eric told Katherine, and they're looking for mathematicians. It's a civilian job, he told her, but attached to Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory--the oldest outpost of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or NACA. Katherine listened intently as her brother-in-law described the work, her thumb cradling her chin, her index finger extended along her cheek, the signal that she was listening carefully. She and Jimmy made a living as public school teachers, but their paychecks were modest. The needs of their three growing daughters seemed greater by the day, and the couple could only just cover their basics and squeeze out a little extra for piano lessons or Girl Scouts. Deft with a sewing machine, Katherine bought fabric from the dry goods store and stayed up nights making school outfits for the girls and dresses for herself.

A recent McKinsey study suggests that 45 percent of on-the-job activities can be automated by deploying artificial intelligence. That includes file clerks, whose jobs can become 80 percent automated, or CEOs' jobs that can be 20 percent automated because AI systems radically simplify and target CEOs' reading of reports, risk detection or pattern recognition. There is understandable consternation about the unbridled power that machines may have over human decision-making. Elon Musk has called AI "our biggest existential threat." On the other side are enthusiasts eager for smart machines to improve our lives and the planet's health.

The experiment with having a robot in my home was going well – useful exchanges, mutual learning, some bonding – right up until the robot thought I told it to "fuck off". But the robot was convinced. It flashed its blue light and scolded me in a tone mixing hurt, disappointment and reprimand: "That's not very nice to say." Or bristled, saying it had erred and should pay more attention before leaping to conclusions. I could have unplugged the thing. Instead, worried at hurt feelings and a vague possibility of retribution, I apologised.

Maria and Bob Hickerson saw their first lionfish on a diving trip in Jamaica in 2009. When they spotted it, they hurried over before this unfamiliar specimen could swim away. But instead, the fish seemed to pause. They took photos and told the dive operator about the fish. He asked for details about where they spotted it.