Two years ago, we spotted an interesting delivery drone concept at a military expo in Washington, D.C., called TACAD, or TACtical Air Delivery. The idea was to use gliders made out of cheap, disposable materials to deliver a substantial amount of supplies over long distances. You'd have to launch these gliders from larger aircraft, but they'd be able to deliver hundreds of kilograms of supplies over a hundred kilometers away, and then they'd just be left where they landed, simple as that. Like many concepts that we see at trade shows, we didn't necessarily expect much to come of this idea, but we're delighted to report that the folks behind it--Logistic Gliders Inc. (LGI), based in Dixon, Calif.--have recently concluded a successful series of flight tests with the U.S. Marine Corps. There are two different kinds of gliders that LGI is working on: The LG-1K, which can carry about 300 kg, and the larger LG-2K, which can carry over 700 kg.

UPS is teaming up with autonomous delivery drone startup Matternet to experiment with using drones to deliver medical supplies, the companies announced on Tuesday. Starting today, the supplies will be delivered via Matternet's M2 quadcopters to WakeMed hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina. The drone delivery program will be overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration and the North Carolina Department of Transportation. It will be small at first: Matternet's drones can only carry payloads of up to five pounds over distances of up to 12.5 miles. Here's how the companies describe the delivery program: Throughout the WakeMed program, a medical professional will load a secure drone container with a medical sample or specimen – such as a blood sample – at one of WakeMed's nearby facilities.

Developing and commercializing artificial intelligence has proved an ethical mine field for companies like Google. The company has seen its algorithms accused of perpetuating race and gender bias and fueling efforts to build autonomous weapons. The search giant now hopes that a team of philosophers, engineers, and policy experts will help it navigate the moral hazards presented by artificial intelligence without press scandals, employee protests, or legal trouble. Kent Walker, Google's senior vice president for global affairs and chief legal officer, announced the creation of a new independent body to review the company's AI practices at EmTech Digital, an AI conference in San Francisco organized by MIT Technology Review. Walker said that the group, known as the Advanced Technology External Advisory Council (ATEAC), would review the company's projects and plans and produce reports to help determine if any of them contravene the company's own AI principles.

The impending demise of Moore's Law has begun to broadly impact the computing research community.38 Moore's Law has driven the computing industry for many decades, with nearly every aspect of society benefiting from the advance of improved computing processors, sensors, and controllers. Behind these products has been a considerable research industry, with billions of dollars invested in fields ranging from computer science to electrical engineering. Fundamentally, however, the exponential growth in computing described by Moore's Law was driven by advances in materials science.30,37 From the start, the power of the computer has been limited by the density of transistors. Progressive advances in how to manipulate silicon through advancing lithography methods and new design tools have kept advancing computing in spite of perceived limitations of the dominant fabrication processes of the time.37 There is strong evidence that this time is indeed different, and Moore's Law is soon to be over for good.3,38 Already, Dennard scaling, Moore's Law's lesser known but equally important parallel, appears to have ended.11 Dennard's scaling refers to the property that the reduction of transistor size came with an equivalent reduction of required power.8

We live in the digital world, where every day we interact with digital systems either through a mobile device or from inside a car. These systems are increasingly autonomous in making decisions over and above their users or on behalf of them. As a consequence, ethical issues--privacy ones included (for example, unauthorized disclosure and mining of personal data, access to restricted resources)--are emerging as matters of utmost concern since they affect the moral rights of each human being and have an impact on the social, economic, and political spheres. Europe is at the forefront of the regulation and reflections on these issues through its institutional bodies. Privacy with respect to the processing of personal data is recognized as part of the fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals.

Informatics for all is a coalition whose aim is to establish informatics as a fundamental discipline to be taken by all students in school. Informatics should be seen as important as mathematics, the sciences, and the various languages. It should be recognized by all as a truly foundational discipline that plays a significant role in education for the 21st century. In Europe, education is a matter left to the individual states. However, education, competencies, and preparedness of the workforce are all important matters for the European Union (EU).

When the signal is in the noise: The limits of Diffix's sticky noise.

For Europe, investment in advanced ICT is a must. With an aging population and a shrinking workforce, Europe needs to tap artificial intelligence (AI), 5G wireless connectivity, quantum computing, and other ICT technologies that could drive the next step change in productivity. To that end, the region can build on a long-standing scientific tradition. Thanks in part to sustained public sector support, Europe is a leading producer of high-quality scientific research. Its scientists excel in aeronautics, transport technologies, and energy and construction, based on the number of widely cited publications.a

The Octobot is fabricated by combining soft lithography, molding, and 3D printing. In a laboratory at Yale University, a soft toy horse with prosthetic coverings around its foam-stuffed legs has taken its first tentative steps. Despite its stiff and not entirely coordinated gait, the toy demonstration may point the way toward helping space agencies put lighter, more versatile robots into space. Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio, assistant professor at the Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science, says she was wrestling with the problem of how to allow robots to handle a wider variety of jobs than current approaches, which often focus on performing a single function well, when the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) issued a request for novel robot designs based on lighter, plastic approaches. Rather than attempt to lift many single-task robots into orbit, the space agency wants a single reconfigurable machine to be able to handle different tasks and, occasionally, to act as prosthetics for human astronauts.

On 21 November 2015, James Bates had three friends over to watch the Arkansas Razorbacks play the Mississippi State Bulldogs. Bates, who lived in Bentonville, Arkansas, and his friends drank beer and did vodka shots as a tight football game unfolded. After the Razorbacks lost 51–50, one of the men went home; the others went out to Bates's hot tub and continued to drink. Bates would later say that he went to bed around 1am and that the other two men – one of whom was named Victor Collins – planned to crash at his house for the night. When Bates got up the next morning, he didn't see either of his friends. But when he opened his back door, he saw a body floating face-down in the hot tub. A grim local affair, the death of Victor Collins would never have attracted international attention if it were not for a facet of the investigation that pitted the Bentonville authorities against one of the world's most powerful companies – Amazon. Collins' death triggered a broad debate about privacy in the voice-computing era, a discussion that makes the big tech companies squirm.