Amazon has started its drone delivery trial in Cambridge, UK, the company announced Wednesday. In a tweet, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos revealed Amazon Prime Air, which promises to deliver packages with small drones in 30 minutes or less after placing an order. The company did not say when the service will be available. "We will deploy when and where we have the regulatory support needed to safely realize our vision," said Amazon. "We're excited about this technology and one day using it to deliver packages to customers around the world in 30 minutes or less."

It emphasizes flexibility through the elegant use of object-oriented design patterns.

Amazon.com has long talked about its ambitions for using drones to deliver small parcels to its legions of customers. Now, it appears the e-commerce giant is one step closer to that goal. On Wednesday, the company said that it has made its first autonomous drone delivery -- an order for an Amazon Fire TV streaming device and a bag of popcorn -- to a shopper in the United Kingdom. Jeffrey P. Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post, tweeted Wednesday morning that the box was at the customer's home 13 minutes after the order was placed. First-ever #AmazonPrimeAir customer delivery is in the books. Check out the video: https://t.co/Xl8HiQMA1S

Robots have already been put to work across a number of industries. They are manufacturing cars, taking care of the elderly, doing housework, homework, and even entering literary awards. It is not surprising then that new robots have been developed to conduct job interviews. One such robot, Matlda, has been programmed to conduct 25-minute interviews in which she works through a roster of up to 76 questions. She records and analyses the interviewee's responses, monitors facial expressions and compares them to other successful employees within the hiring company.

The Minecraft video game is popular with children; now a version is being used to test artificial-intelligence programs. The Minecraft video game was familiar to José Hernández-Orallo long before he started using it for his own research. The computer scientist, who devises ways to benchmark machine intelligence at the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain, first watched his own children play inside the 3D virtual world, which focuses on solving problems rather than shooting monsters. In 2014, Microsoft bought Minecraft, and its science arm, Microsoft Research, gave its own researchers access to a new version of the game that allowed computer programs, as well as people, to explore and customize the 3D environment. Then, after inviting a small group of outside researchers that included Hernández-Orallo to download the machine-friendly version of the world, last July, Microsoft made it freely available to anyone, with the goal of speeding up progress in artificial intelligence (AI).

Earth is NOT prepared for a surprise asteroid strike: Nasa warns'there's not a lot we can do about it at the moment' Experts have warned that humans are not prepared for an asteroid impact, and should one head for Earth, there's not much we can do about it (stock image) Back from the dead: Haunting reconstruction lets you look... Can'antacids' tackle climate change? Scientists say... Nasa and Stephen Hawking to launch a'self-healing' starship... The mystery of the'brightest supernova ever seen':... Back from the dead: Haunting reconstruction lets you look... Can'antacids' tackle climate change? Scientists say... Nasa and Stephen Hawking to launch a'self-healing' starship... The mystery of the'brightest supernova ever seen':... Nasa is planning an ambitious mission that will see a robotic spaceship visit an asteroid to create an orbiting base for astronauts.

Now we know what facial expression the rodents make when they're feeling good. The best way to tell if a rat's happy, according to a new study, is to look at its ears. A happy rat's ears hang relaxed to the sides (right), instead of perked up (left). It can be hard to tell, since they can't exactly greet us with a grin. But now, for the first time, scientists have spotted the rat equivalent of a smile--and it's all in the ears. They found that happy laboratory rats not only can be literally tickled pink, but they relax their ears so that they hang loosely to the side.

Google's self-driving cars have graduated from the company's "moonshot division", X labs, to become a full-blown subsidiary of umbrella group Alphabet, called Waymo. The new company, headed by X alumni John Krafcik, is charged with turning the self-driving car technology that Google has been developing behind closed doors into a viable business for the future. How that will actually happen, though, Waymo has apparently not yet decided. Mooted revenue streams include Uber-style driverless ride sharing, disrupting the trucking and logistics sector, fitting self-driving technology into public transit vehicles, improving the "last mile" of postal delivery or even simply licensing the software to car manufacturers who will sell cars to end users. "Self-driving technology is awesome in all these categories," said Krafcik at an event to announce the launch of Waymo.

Some videos are available only by enrolling in a Coursera or EdX class. It is free to do so, but sometimes the classes are no longer in session so you have to wait a couple of months, so you have no access. I'm going to be adding more videos from public sources and replacing the online course videos over time. I like using university lectures.

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