Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. At the Queensland University of Technology, in Australia, roboticists have spent the last 14 years honing a robot navigation system modeled on the brains of rats. This biologically inspired approach, they hope, could help robots navigate dynamic environments without requiring advanced, costly sensors and computationally intensive algorithms.

Uber admitted that it hired a former Google employee despite being warned that he possessed sensitive documents from the Silicon Valley giant, adding a new twist to a court battle over trade secrets. Waymo, the self-driving car developer created by Alphabet's (GOOGL) Google, has accused Uber of using stolen trade secrets in its own software that would serve as the backbone of autonomous vehicles. Uber has denied the charges. However, the ride-sharing company fired Anthony Levandowski, the ex-Google engineer and Uber executive, for failing to cooperate with an internal investigation. Waymo's lawsuit maintains that Uber then transplanted the intellectual property allegedly stolen by Levandowski into its own fleet of self-driving vehicles -- a charge that Uber has adamantly denied since Waymo filed its complaint in federal court four months ago.

Alphabet Inc. (GOOG) subsidiary Google's artificial intelligence company DeepMind Health has signed an agreement with a hospital that is part of the U.K.'s National Health Service (NHS) network to deploy Streams, an app that monitors critical indicators of a patient's health and alerts doctors. This is the second such deal signed by DeepMind this year. Earlier, the company signed a similar agreement for patient data with three hospitals that operate under the NHS umbrella. As part of the agreements, DeepMind receives access to important patient data and medical histories. News reports have alleged that DeepMind obtained the data without explicit consent from the affected patients.

Security strategies must undergo a radical revolution. Tomorrow's security devices will need to see and operate internally among them to recognize changes in the interconnected environments and thus automatically be able to anticipate risks, update and enforce policies. Devices must have the ability to monitor and share critical information and synchronize their responses to detect threats. A new technology that has recently grabbed attention lays the foundation for such an automation approach. This has been called Intent-Based Network Security (IBNS).

Supercomputers today are capable of performing incredible feats, from accurately predicting the weather to uncovering insights into climate change, but they still by and large rely on brute processor power to accomplish their tasks. That's where this new partnership between the US Air Force and IBM comes in. They're teaming up to build the world's first supercomputer that behaves like a natural brain. IBM and the USAF announced on Friday that the machine will run on an array of 64 TrueNorth Neurosynaptic chips. The TrueNorth chips are wired together like, and operate in a similar fashion to, the synapses within a biological brain.

Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma, in an interview to CNBC, said the rising technological advancements in artificial intelligence could lead to World War III. Speaking to the news channel, the billionaire Chinese business magnate said there is a need for the world leaders to educate people about the pain that the rapid rise in automation and artificial intelligence will bring. "The first technology revolution caused World War I. The second technology revolution caused World War II. This is the third technology revolution," he said.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti urges the public to ask their members of Congress to support continued federal funding of the earthquake early warning system. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti urges the public to ask their members of Congress to support continued federal funding of the earthquake early warning system. In this hyper-partisan era, there may be one issue that unites California Democrats and Republicans: Earthquakes. Elected officials from both parties have supported an earthquake early warning system for the West Coast that, after years of work, was scheduled to begin its first limited public operation next year. But President Trump's budget proposal calls for cuts that experts say would kill the warning network.

These are the horrifying photos from the heyday of the Eugenics movement that the world wants to forget. Before the atrocities of Nazi Germany, eugenics - the system of measuring human traits, seeking out the desirable ones and cutting out the undesirable ones - was once practised the world over. In the decades following the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin's'On the Origin of Species', a veritable craze for eugenics spread through Britain, the United States and Europe. Bruno Beger was a German racial anthropologist who worked for the Ahnenerbe, a project in Nazi Germany to research the archaeological and cultural history of the Aryan race. In this image taken in 1938, Dr Beger is measuring a Tibetan woman's head to demonstrate what he believed were the'inferior' characteristics of her race Advocates of eugenics made significant advances during the early twentieth century - and claimed that'undesirable' genetic traits such as dwarfism, deafness and even minor defects like a cleft palate needed to be wiped out of the gene pool.

The passwords of thousands of British politicians, senior police officers and other top officials have been stolen and traded by hackers, it has been reported. The login details of education secretary Justine Greening and business secretary Greg Clark are believed to be some of those that were reportedly exchanged by Russian hackers. The head of IT at the Foreign Office, the director-general of the Department for Exiting the European Union and former detective chief inspector Andy Redwood were also reportedly affected. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Two and a half years ago, President Obama called on the FCC to classify broadband internet as a utility. It joined a small club that you know well: electricity, gas, and running water. And now this club may be welcoming yet another new member. Is artificial intelligence the newest utility? Are we witnessing the dawn of AI being as ubiquitous as running water?