When the Office of Emergency Management in Bergen County, New Jersey, went shopping for a drone, it had a few criteria. The platform had to be robust and capable of rapid deployment in emergency situations. It also had to be dead easy to use, even on complex missions, and completely secure. Nothing spells'lawsuit' like a renegade drone with "Property of Bergen County" printed on the side. The dilemma facing the Bergen County procurement team is one that law enforcement and emergency response agencies all over the country, and indeed the world, are confronting as drones become standard kit in the sector.

Oroville - For the first time since it was completed in 1968, California's rain-swollen Oroville Dam overtopped its emergency spillway on Saturday, sending sheets of water down a forested hillside, adding mud and debris to the churning Feather River below. Turmoil grows over White House correspondents' dinner Washington - It is supposed to be a light-hearted gathering of journalists, celebrities and the president, where differences are put aside for good-natured jibes. Review: Tenor Mario Frangoulis charms on'Send Me An Angel' Special International tenor Mario Frangoulis delivers on his live performance of "Send Me An Angel," which was filmed in Greece. Germany to elect'anti-Trump' Steinmeier as new president Berlin - Billed as Germany's "anti-Trump", centre-left former foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier is set to be elected Sunday as the new ceremonial head of state. Konjic - Bosnia's fisheries watchdog gazes over an expanse of sand and mud, a space once occupied by a large thriving lake but recently emptied in the race for electricity production.

It has been dubbed the Robo-Olympics, and will see the world's most advanced robots go head to series in a series of ever more challenging events. Twenty five of the top robotics organizations in the world are competing for $3.5 million in prizes, and will take on a gruelling simulated disaster-response course during the two day contest. Robots will try to complete a series of challenge tasks selected by DARPA for their relevance to disaster response. The robots will start in a vehicle, drive to a simulated disaster building, and then they'll have to open doors, walk on rubble, and use tools. There will be a surprise task waiting for the robots at the end - which turned out to be turning a valve.

Automation is happening, and will change the daily work activities of everyone, from miners and landscapers to commercial bankers, fashion designers, welders, and CEOs. Use the interactive to explore how robotics and artificial intelligence could potentially change how work is done in four settings: oil and gas exploration, aircraft maintenance, hospital emergency departments, and grocery stores. These case studies are not precise projections. The vision of the future they provide is based on the hypotheses of industry experts. To learn more about the impact of automation on the global economy and labor markets, read the McKinsey Global Institute research report Harnessing automation for a future that works.

Take a golf ball and a cannonball and drop them off the Tower of Pisa. The laws of physics allow you to predict their trajectories pretty much as accurately as you could wish for. Now do the same experiment again, but replace the cannonball with a pigeon. Biological systems don't defy physical laws, of course--but neither do they seem to be predicted by them. In contrast, they are goal-directed: survive and reproduce. We can say that they have a purpose--or what philosophers have traditionally called a teleology--that guides their behavior. By the same token, physics now lets us predict, starting from the state of the universe a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, what it looks like today.

Robot makers have turned to nature for their latest creation – a two-legged machine that walks like an ostrich. Called Cassie, the bipedal robot has a unique leg design that looks similar to the large bird, allowing it to crouch down and easily stand up without falling. Although the machine is intended to be a development platform, Researchers foresee its design being used to develop robots that deliver packages or assist in search and rescue missions. Robot makers have turned to nature for their latest creation – a two-legged machine that walks like an ostrich. Cassie is changing the game for two-legged robots.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) wasn't kidding when it said the radiation levels inside Fukushima's nuclear reactor are the highest they've been since its meltdown in 2011. It had to pull out the robot it sent in to find the exact location of melted uranium fuel and to do preliminary cleanup inside the reactor, because it died shortly after it started its mission. Apparently, two of the machine's cameras suddenly became wonky, darkened and developed a lot of noise after merely two hours of scraping debris away. Those are all signs of extremely high radiation levels. Tepco believes the robot endured approximately 650 Sieverts of radiation per hour if it only lasted a couple of hours.

Radiation inside Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant reached such astronomical levels Thursday that not even a robot could survive inside. A remote controlled cleaning machine sent into the incapacitated plant had to be pulled out after it ceased to function due to high levels of radiation. It was the first time a robot had entered the No. 2 reactor since the plant's meltdown in 2011. Radiation reached "unimaginable" levels recently, experts told The Japan Times. The previous high was measured at 73 sieverts per hour, one year after the disaster.

The high radiation estimates in the No. 2 reactor of the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant will probably force a rethink of the nationalized utility's robot-based strategy for locating its molten fuel. According to an analysis of Thursday's abbreviated probe, the radiation in the primary containment vessel is about 650 sieverts per hour, more than the 530 sieverts estimated late last month, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holding Inc. said. That level could kill a person quickly and indicates the fuel likely burned through the pressure vessel during the meltdown and is somewhere nearby. Tepco, as the utility is known, halted Thursday's robot after its camera went dark. The company suspects the problem was caused by the radiation.

We introduce a near-linear complexity (geometric and meshless/algebraic) multigrid/multiresolution method for PDEs with rough ($L^\infty$) coefficients with rigorous a-priori accuracy and performance estimates. The method is discovered through a decision/game theory formulation of the problems of (1) identifying restriction and interpolation operators (2) recovering a signal from incomplete measurements based on norm constraints on its image under a linear operator (3) gambling on the value of the solution of the PDE based on a hierarchy of nested measurements of its solution or source term. The resulting elementary gambles form a hierarchy of (deterministic) basis functions of $H^1_0(\Omega)$ (gamblets) that (1) are orthogonal across subscales/subbands with respect to the scalar product induced by the energy norm of the PDE (2) enable sparse compression of the solution space in $H^1_0(\Omega)$ (3) induce an orthogonal multiresolution operator decomposition. The operating diagram of the multigrid method is that of an inverted pyramid in which gamblets are computed locally (by virtue of their exponential decay), hierarchically (from fine to coarse scales) and the PDE is decomposed into a hierarchy of independent linear systems with uniformly bounded condition numbers. The resulting algorithm is parallelizable both in space (via localization) and in bandwith/subscale (subscales can be computed independently from each other). Although the method is deterministic it has a natural Bayesian interpretation under the measure of probability emerging (as a mixed strategy) from the information game formulation and multiresolution approximations form a martingale with respect to the filtration induced by the hierarchy of nested measurements.