The slow-moving, unidentified object flying over South Korea's border on Tuesday afternoon caused so much concern that soldiers issued loudspeaker warnings and ultimately fired more than 90 machine gun rounds in the air. What first seemed like a provocative North Korean military incursion -- perhaps a drone flight over the two countries' highly secured border -- turned out to be much more innocuous, the South Korean military said Wednesday. After studying radar evidence and thermal imagery, those military officials now believe the incident was sparked by a group of large North Korean balloons -- likely an effort to drop propaganda leaflets on the rogue state's ideological adversaries in the South. Though less serious than first reported, the incident underscores the heightened tensions along the border, and the region generally. That's because of the North's continued advancement as a nuclear state and its increasing technical prowess in developing missiles that can deliver warheads.

When thousands of football fans pour into Cardiff's Principality Stadium on June 3 to watch the final match of the UEFA Champions League, few will be aware that their faces will have already been scanned, processed, and compared to a police database of some 500,000 "persons of interest". According to a government tender issued by South Wales Police, the system will be deployed during the day of the game in Cardiff's main train station, as well as in and around the Principality Stadium situated in the heart of Cardiff's central retail district. Cameras will potentially be scanning the faces of an estimated 170,000 visitors plus the many more thousands of people in the vicinity of the bustling Saturday evening city center on match day, June 3. Captured images will then be compared in real time to 500,000 custody images stored in the police information and records management system alerting police to any "persons of interest," according to the tender. The security operation will build on previous police use of Automated Facial Recognition, or AFR technology by London's Metropolitan Police during 2016's Notting Hill Carnival.

NASA recently launched Mars rovers that students had designed, sending them into space for about 20 minutes to see how they would perform high above Earth's surface. The students working on the robotics project were from Virginia Tech and the University of Central Florida, NASA reported, and they used 3D printing to build the prototypes that could be used to explore Mars but would store easily, with features like folding or collapsible parts. The rocket last week sent them up 154 miles, then brought them down with a parachute into the Atlantic Ocean. "Part of the problem we keep running into is packaging," NASA research engineer Jamshid Samareh said in the space agency's statement. "We have to carry a lot of payloads -- rovers, habitats and such. We want to package them on top of the launch vehicle. Rovers have classically been bulky and heavy. The students helped design 18 of the more lightweight and less cumbersome Mars rovers, four of which were built and launched on the NASA rocket. "I have always thought of mass to be the limiting factor in space travel," Virginia Tech student Alex Matta, said in the NASA statement. "Participation in this project led me to realize that minimizing volume of the cargo is important as well." The students offered a fresh set of eyes and minds to the effort. Students watch a NASA rocket carry their Mars rover designs into space. NASA research engineer Jamshid Samareh shows off one of the student-made Mars rover designs that recently launched into space. "They come up with these ideas that I cannot come up with," Samareh said. "They have a different mentality.

For decades, technology has relentlessly made phones, laptops, apps and entire industries cheaper and better--while health care has stubbornly loitered in an alternate universe where tech makes everything more expensive and more complex. Now startups are applying artificial intelligence (AI), floods of data and automation in ways that promise to dramatically drive down the costs of health care while increasing effectiveness. If this profound trend plays out, within five to 10 years, Congress won't have to fight about the exploding costs of Medicaid and insurance. Instead, it might battle over what to do with a massive windfall. Today's debate over the repeal of Obamacare would come to seem as backward as a discussion about the merits of leeching. One proof point is in the maelstrom of activity around diabetes, the most expensive disease in the world.

Maoist Nepali Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal resigned on Wednesday, leaving a leadership vacuum weeks before the second round of local elections. Dahal took office only nine months ago. The municipal and village assembly vote is the first in the past two decades. The prime minister's exit from government was somewhat expected under a power-sharing deal with the Nepali Congress Party. It came earlier than predicted though after the Communist UML opposition party threatened to block Dahal's speech in parliament, saying the government had created local and municipal bodies without due legal process.

More than 100 years ago, the invention of the internal combustion engine revolutionized automotive travel, and with it gave birth to a new industrial economy. Just as internal combustion once did, the proliferation of data science and analytics is once again reshaping the information economy and transforming how we interact with technology. Business analytics, in particular, is playing a pivotal role in improving operations at large-scale organizations. For example--UPS, a shipping service, saved $30 million in fuel by using predictive analytics. These kinds of cost savings are mouthwatering if you're a C-suite executive.

WHEN it comes to detecting landmines, being slow is an advantage. Swarms of robotic sea turtles teaching themselves to crawl in the Arizona desert could one day be used to help clear landmines in war zones. The military already has minesweeping robots, but their bulk makes them costly and difficult to deploy – something the turtle bots could help resolve. The robotic turtles, which are about the size of a small drone, are laser-cut from two sheets of cardboard before being folded together origami-style and fitted with an inexpensive computer chip and motors that move their fins. Each robot only takes 2 to 3 hours to put together and costs around $80, so losing one in a landmine blast isn't necessarily a huge setback, says Heni Ben Amor, joint leader of the project at Arizona State University.

The Middle East and North Africa's youthful, fast-urbanizing population are perfectly placed to embrace technology and reap the rewards of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Much has been written already about the arrival of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and the opportunity that the convergence of its new technologies offers in terms of building value into production systems and economies around the world. In one sense, the playing field could be levelled out. Localized production is being made more feasible for many small producers, setting developing communities on a path towards self-sufficiency, while falling costs could enable factories of all sizes to boost their productivity levels. However, on the opposite side of the equation, news headlines have been dominated by predictions that human workers will be substituted by robots, leading to widespread job losses and heightened societal challenges. Additionally, doubt has been shed on the ability of regions that are less industrialized, or those with fractured economies and infrastructure, to be able to respond to these disruptions and compete effectively in the future.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has developed a'crash-proof' drone to fly on missions to Mars and beyond. The new drones could one day help Martian settlers explore lava tubes on the planet by mapping out tight spots that humans cannot reach. The drone, surrounded by a protective spherical cage and equipped with thermal cameras, deliberately bumps into its surroundings in order to build a 3D-map. The European Space Agency (ESA) has developed a'crash-proof' drone (pictured) to fly on missions to Mars and beyond. The ESA has been testing equipment, techniques and working methods in caves for space missions for many years.

Is it just a new version of the model aircraft that decades of schoolchildren have flown in their backyards and parks with little harm to people or property? Or is it a far more dangerous, often much more substantial, piece of machinery that can fly thousands of feet in the air, requires little or no training to get off the ground and can cause serious damage? And that's a problem because, as a federal appeals court noted last week, the Federal Aviation Administration doesn't have the authority to regulate model aircraft. This means the FAA must drop its 18-month-old requirement that owners of large recreational drones (defined as between 0.55 pound and 55 pounds) register with a federal database before they take to the air and possibly blunder into the path of a commercial jet. Congress must fix this, and quickly.