Sussex Police have released the man and woman arrested on December 21st after determining that they're "no longer suspects" behind the multiple incidents. Don't anticipate new suspects in the future, either. Detective Chief Superintendent Jason Tingley said his force continued to "actively follow lines of investigation," but didn't hint at where those might lead. In a conversation to Sky News, Tingley said officers had found a damaged drone at the airport in Horley and were on an "expedited" effort to examine that drone for evidence. There's an increased financial motivation to bring the perpetrators in, at least.

This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter's independently chosen editorial picks, Wirecutter and Engadget may earn affiliate commission. After 45 hours of research and test flying 14 models, we think the DJI Mavic 2 Pro is the best drone for aspiring aerial photographers and videographers thanks to its high-end camera, autonomous obstacle avoidance, long battery life, and portability. Pilots of all skill levels will find it to be exceptionally reliable and easy to fly. The Mavic 2 Pro features a Hasselblad-branded camera (DJI bought a majority stake in the camera brand in 2017), which captures 20-megapixel photographs and 4K videos that look more colorful than those captured by the competition. Its ability to sense and avoid obstacles in all directions and steadily hold its position even in moderate winds lets you focus on your cinematography instead of worrying about keeping the drone steady. It also features DJI's smart-flight modes like ActiveTrack, which directs the drone to autonomously follow and film a subject while still avoiding obstacles. Its 31-minute battery life means you don't have to land for a battery swap as often as other drones, and at 8.4 by 3.6 by 3.3 inches folded and 2 pounds, you can take the Mavic 2 Pro almost anywhere--it fits exceptionally well in our top pick for drone backpacks. It's also compatible with the DJI Goggles FPV headset we recommend. The Mavic 2 Zoom looks and flies identical to the Mavic 2 Pro, but it trades out the Hasselblad camera in favor of a different camera that can zoom 2 times optically and 2 times digitally (with software that avoids losing detail), for up to 4x usable "lossless" zoom.

I can't count the number of animal stories that appeared in my timelines this year with comments like, "Everything is garbage, so here's this." There was the cat who was reunited with her family after the Camp Fire, in California, and the parrot who was adopted after getting kicked out of an animal shelter for swearing too saltily. Among the bears preparing for hibernation at Katmai National Park, a female named Beadnose became famous for being the most gloriously round. There was the baby raccoon who scaled a skyscraper in St. Paul, "Mission Impossible" style, stopping occasionally for naps in window ledges along the way. Stories from the animal world offer reliable moments of escapism--the ones we see in viral videos are usually cute, or tame, or strange and majestic, and glimpsed from a safe distance.

On a hot late-summer day in 2005, I sat in a packed, agreeably air-conditioned auditorium and listened to a university administrator welcome the class of 2009. As the popular saying goes, 'The rich go to Peking U, the poor go to Tsinghua, and the ones willing to work themselves to death come to USTC.'" If Peking University is China's Harvard, and Tsinghua is China's MIT, the University of Science and Technology of China, or USTC, is known as "the Caltech of China" for its small size and intense focus on science and engineering. I was proud to be there. But my pride shifted to awkwardness after the speech, when we stood to sing the university anthem, which ends with an exhortation: "Always learn from the people, and learn from the great leader Mao Zedong!" Hearing Mao's name left a bitter taste. It reminded me of career paths my country had denied me. Without the rule of law, I could not become a lawyer. Without a free press, I could not become a journalist. Without democratic elections, I could not become a politician. Instead I did what was expected of Chinese students without political connections or financial resources but with impeccable grades: I came to USTC to study science. The lyrics of the anthem brought up a question my classmates and I would often ponder: Must scientific research be in service of one's country--or can the pursuit of knowledge transcend nationalism? Generations of scientists at USTC have sought to answer this question. The university gave birth to both China's first satellite, launched in 1970, and the world's first quantum-communication satellite, launched in 2016. It is home to China's first synchrotron particle accelerator, and it will soon host a new multibillion-dollar quantum-science center. Over the years, faculty and students have, at times, wielded the university's scientific prestige as a shield to protect academic freedom and political independence. But if the university's rising trajectory in recent years is any indication, science in China thrives most when it serves the state. Today I live and work in the United States. I spoke to many old schoolmates and current USTC researchers to report this article. The story of USTC that emerges reveals the limits of science's ability to transcend China's authoritarian politics. It is also the story of my family across three generations. USTC was founded in Beijing in 1958, to train scientists for China's fledgling nuclear and space programs. Members of the faculty were drawn from China's scientific elite. Fang Lizhi, one of the first, came to teach physics after being deemed too politically outspoken to work on the bomb. "He was actually happy about it!

Born in Beijing and educated at Harvard, Yasheng Huang, a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, is a keen observer of China's entrepreneurial efforts and the role the government has played in the country's remarkable growth. Will Knight, a senior editor at MIT Technology Review, recently talked with Huang about the country's changing technology scene. In what areas of technology is China ahead? In AI and big data, China is surging ahead, there's no doubt. These are areas compatible with the government's politics and things like its "social credit system."

In 1994, soon after Jeff Bezos incorporated what would become Amazon, the entrepreneur briefly contemplated changing the company's name. The nascent firm had been dubbed "Cadabra," but Bezos wanted a less playful, more accurate alternative: "Relentless." Twenty-four years later, perhaps no adjective better describes Bezos' empire than the name he once wanted to give it. The company is known as the "everything store," but in its dogged pursuit of growth, Amazon has come to dominate more than just ecommerce. Amazon is a fashion designer, advertising business, television and movie producer, book publisher, and the owner of a sprawling platform for crowdsourced micro-labor tasks.

OSAKA - With six months to go until the Group of 20 summit in Osaka, the basic agenda has been set for discussion on issues of global importance. But with the G20 process increasingly seen as failing and many leaders likely to arrive in Osaka with severe domestic political problems at home, what will come out of the summit in terms of new agreements to cooperate on issues ranging from climate change to sustainable development to strengthening multilateral free trade and investment is increasingly unclear. On Dec. 1, as the G20 leaders' summit in Buenos Aires closed, Prime Minster Shinzo Abe outlined the agenda of what will be discussed when the leaders meet on June 28 and 29 in Osaka. "At the G20 Osaka Summit, I will set our goal to materialize a free, open, and inclusive and sustainable future society and promote efforts to this end, through our development efforts centered on the sustainable development goals and contributions to addressing global issues, along with driving the world economy through the promotion of free trade and innovation as well as simultaneously achieving economic growth and inequality correction," Abe told the other leaders. Technological innovation, especially in artificial intelligence and robotics, is another area that Japan will ask world leaders to discuss, along with infrastructure development and global health care.

Why: With 58 percent of respondents to a 2018 NASCIO survey expecting artificial intelligence and machine learning to be the most impactful emerging technologies over the next three to five years, NASCIO investigates how the technology is currently being used by state governments. Findings: A recent Deloitte report outlines four uses of automation: relieving humans of day-to-day tasks; splitting up tasks to allow computers do so some work and humans to supervise; replacing work done by humans; and augmenting work to make humans more efficient or effective at their jobs. Robotic process automation is making inroads in both back-office and front-office functions, the NASCIO study finds, saving between 40 and 70 percent on labor costs and completing work with near zero error rates. The North Carolina Innovation Center, for example, is using chatbots to split up some of its help desk work, and Mississippi's citizen-facing chatbot can respond to over 100 inquiries. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency is using AI to import real-time weather information, crunch the numbers and develop basic analysis that meteorologists review.

For the past several years, giant tech companies have rapidly ramped up investments in artificial intelligence and machine learning. They've competed intensely to hire more AI researchers and used that talent to rush out smarter virtual assistants and more powerful facial recognition. In 2018, some of those companies moved to put some guardrails around AI technology. The most prominent example is Google, which announced constraints on its use of AI after two projects triggered public pushback and an employee revolt. The internal dissent began after the search company's work on a Pentagon program called Maven became public.

Functional data analysis is a statistical framework where data are assumed to follow some functional form. This method of analysis is commonly applied to time series data, where time, measured continuously or in discrete intervals, serves as the location for a function's value. Gaussian processes are a generalization of the multivariate normal distribution to function space and, in this paper, they are used to shed light on coastal rainfall patterns in British Columbia (BC). Specifically, this work addressed the question over how one should carry out an exploratory cluster analysis for the BC, or any similar, coastal rainfall data. An approach is developed for clustering multiple processes observed on a comparable interval, based on how similar their underlying covariance kernel is. This approach provides significant insights into the BC data, and these insights can be described in terms of El Nino and La Nina; however, the result is not simply one cluster representing El Nino years and another for La Nina years. From one perspective, the results show that clustering annual rainfall can potentially be used to identify extreme weather patterns.