Students from ETH Zurich are developing an exoskeleton for paraplegics that they say more accurately mimics natural knee gait meaning it won't struggle on uneven terrain. Powered exoskeletons can give paraplegics or those with lower-limb weakness the ability to walk again. Mechanical engineers from ETH Zurich believe they have the solution. This prototype exoskeleton has one important addition that could make it able to cope with whatever comes its way. "Here with the Varileg we implemented the mechanical variable impedance, which is something special that no other exoskeleton has implemented at the moment. And the advantage of this is that we can mimic the human-like stiffness adaptation of the human knee and this also allows us to adapt to unexpected obstacles because we can say how stiff the knee should behave."

A drone flies Feb. 27, 2015, over Reims, northwestern France. SAN FRANCISCO -- The national group that represents companies that make and sell drones has split, with those focused on consumers leaving to form their own organization. Four drone companies left the Small UAV Coalition on Thursday. While still tightly aligned with the coalition on big issues, the break-away companies plan to create a still-unnamed group to very specifically focus on consumer issues, said GoPro spokesman Jeff Brown. As the drone market matures, a shifting of needs was inevitable. Larger companies such as Amazon's Prime Air, Alphabet's Google X and others are looking more at drones for delivery, cargo and more commercial uses.

Dubbed the "Picobug" and inspired by a male stag beetle, the compact, 30-gram robot combines the flight of a Dragonfly quadrotor and the crawl of a DASH robot that allows multiple modes of locomotion. It can fly up to 13 miles per hour and skitter across a 10-foot-long table in 19 seconds. The university's GRASP Laboratory released footage of the little robot scuttling across a flat surface, flying over a cinder block, and traveling through tight spaces by flying and crawling simultaneously. Video by PBS NewsHour, footage provided by the University of Pennsylvania's GRASP Laboratory. "Because of its small size, the Picobug can explore environments that other robots would not be able to access," Yash Mulgaonkar, a researcher at UPenn's GRASP Laboratory, told IEEE Spectrum.

The war film is one of cinema's most enduring genres; nearly every major conflict of the past century has been depicted on screen--multiple times. Films that wrestle with the rapidly changing nature of war, though, are rarer. As drone warfare continues its slow march into public consciousness, Eye in the Sky is the best movie yet to tackle the legal and moral quagmire surrounding modern technological warfare. To do that, Eye in the Sky goes granular, telling the story of one particular mission on one particular day. In the movie, opening wide today, British colonel Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren) oversees a secret operation to capture a terrorist cell in Nairobi, Kenya.

While traveling in Western Samoa many years ago, I met a young Harvard University graduate student researching ants. He invited me on a hike into the jungles to assist with his search for the tiny insect. He told me his goal was to discover a new species of ant, in hopes it might be named after him one day. Whenever I look up at the stars at night pondering the cosmos, I think of my ant collector friend, kneeling in the jungle with a magnifying glass, scouring the earth. I think of him, because I believe in aliens--and I've often wondered if aliens are doing the same to us.

If you want to see some of the stuff that Tay tweeted, head over here.

Developers gathered at the Microsoft BUILD developers conference in San Francisco to hear about the latest and greatest from Microsoft. Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, speaks at the keynote ceremony of the Microsoft Build Developers conference. SAN FRANCISCO – Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella kicked off the company's Build developers conference with a vision of the future filled with chatbots, machine learning and artificial intelligence. "Bots are the new apps," said Nadella during a nearly three-hour keynote here that sketched a vision for the way humans will interact with machines. That's the world you're going to get to see in the years to come."

The robots are coming, or so media have proclaimed in recent months. The world of work is about to undergo a revolution as advances in technology mean that many jobs humans do now will likely be done by machines instead in a matter of years. How many roles will go and what sectors will be most affected is open to debate but it seems certain widespread change is upon us. According to a World Economic Forum (WEF) report published in January, more than seven million jobs are at risk from advances in technology in the world's largest economies over the next five years. If anything this is a conservative estimate.

The European Union is looking to connected vehicles and autonomous driving to reduce traffic fatalities, after a disappointing year for road safety. Last year, 26,000 died on European roads, up 1 percent on the previous year. "The latest figures are disappointing. For the second year in a row, we have not managed to reduce the number of victims on our roads," said European Commissioner for Transport Violeta Bulc, presenting the EU's latest study of traffic accident statistics in Brussels on Thursday. Disappointing though the rise is, EU roads are still among the safest in the world, with traffic fatalities down 17 percent since 2010, after a reduction of 43 percent in the previous decade.

The internet, and more importantly how we consume data from the web, has evolved at an incredible pace in recent years. One thing that has been steadily growing, and is only now really starting to make the headlines is Machine Learning. "Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the Web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on."