U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton speaks at Futuramic Tool & Engineering in Warren, Michigan August 11, 2016. WASHINGTON -- Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton spelled out their economic visions in high-profile speeches in Michigan this week. They delved into taxes and regulations, trade deals and job growth. Mostly unmentioned were major challenges that have slowed the U.S. economy and made good-paying jobs harder to find, particularly in struggling pockets of the country. Automation and increasingly high-skilled jobs that require technological know-how that many people lack. They are problems that analysts say require a transformative vision.

Whether or not it's a realistic or practical or good idea, urban commercial drone delivery is grinding remorselessly toward a thing that is going to happen. For many companies, "grind" is the right word, especially if they're trying to do research and development in the United States, where regulations tend to be overly cumbersome and inflexible. To help move things along a bit, Amazon has decided to take its next phase of delivery drone testing to the United Kingdom. Here's the stuff worth caring about from the press release, which amounts to about a third of the press release. In other words, it's relatively informative, as press releases go: Amazon has today announced a partnership with the UK Government to explore the steps needed to make the delivery of parcels by small drones a reality, allowing Amazon to trial new methods of testing its delivery systems.

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the authors and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. Light detection and ranging, or lidar, is a sensing technology based on laser light. It's similar to radar, but can have a higher resolution, since the wavelength of light is about 100,000 times smaller than radio wavelengths. For robots, this is very important: Since radar cannot accurately image small features, a robot equipped with only a radar module would have a hard time grasping a complex object.

Editor's note: Our story was based on the premise that the advanced radars discussed below were intended for autonmous cars. GM contacted IEEE Spectrum after publication to say that the radars are not intended for autonomous vehicles. The FCC filings referenced in the IEEE Spectrum story are not part of our autonomous vehicle development program. They are related to further advancement of technologies featured on our vehicles today. General Motors (GM) is likely building a fleet of 725 self-driving taxis for its partnership with Lyft, with an intended launch date of January 2019, according to documents filed with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your baby-loving 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. We got a teaser about the Omnicopter during Raff D'Andrea's most recent TED Talk, but this dedicated video shows it off much better: Like all the coolest robots, the things it can do look like CGI, right? On July 27, 2016, Michigan-based Vayu, Inc., in collaboration with the Stony Brook University Global Health Institute completed the first ever series of long-range, fully autonomous drone delivery flights with blood and stool samples, setting records in the process.

DARPA is exploring how to defend against a swarm of attack drones. DARPA is already developing concepts for a swarm of drones to drop out of aircraft and has drones that can fly at 45mph. Now, in its never-ending quest to close capability gaps, the Pentagon's advanced research agency wants to develop a defensive system that can take out an attacking fleet of small unmanned air systems (sUAS). DARPA outlines in a new request for information its concerns about the impact of commercial drone technology on defense capabilities, particularly the protection of large and dispersed ground and naval forces where conventional weapons, such as missiles, might not be as effective in future. Responding to this threat, the agency wants a new technology that can rapidly "detect, identify, track, and neutralize" a potential attack from these drones.

I was going to start this column with some new productivity figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but I realized that at least half of the readers would quit right there. Productivity is one of those subjects that fascinates economists and bores, or mystifies, almost everyone else. Instead, let's start with a little story. Imagine that it's 1890 and you and a friend have bought a donkey and cart and started a moving company that transports heavy objects, such as sofas and beds. If you work hard, you can manage two deliveries a day, for each of which you charge a price that, if adjusted for inflation, would amount to fifty-five dollars today. Let's say overhead, such as advertising and food for the donkey, comes to ten dollars a day.

China Miéville has long had spiders on the brain. In his breakthrough novel, 2000's "Perdido Street Station," a mysterious, spiderlike being called the Weaver assists a scientist named Isaac who's trying to save the fantastical city of Bas-Lag from a catastrophic infestation. In Miéville's new novella, "The Last Days of New Paris," the streets of Paris in 1950 have gone haywire after the detonation of a reality-altering bomb that brings various Surrealist works to frightening life, including an arachnoid manifestation reminiscent of Odilon Redon's painting "The Smiling Spider." "There's something about the arachnid," Miéville told me recently, on the phone from his home in London. Bataille writes about the spider as an avatar of formlessness, this very, very powerful thing.

Are you better at science than the Donald? These 20 questions will help you find out! This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Every election cycle, science gets the short end of the stick. So a collective of scientists--56 scientific organizations representing 10 million scientists and engineers and spearheaded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science--tries to engage them in a debate by compiling a list of science-based questions, soliciting answers, and publishing them.

To mark the 47th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon-landing mission, the Smithsonian has revealed a stunning high resolution 3D model of the command module'Columbia,' the spacecraft that carried astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin'Buzz' Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon. The stunning virtual 3-D model that will allow the public a look inside the car-sized Apollo 11 command module. As one of the most sophisticated scans ever made of a historic artifact, it employed seven different scanning technologies to capture nearly 1 trillion high-resolution measurements producing more than a terabyte of compressed data resulting in a highly detailed master model. To mark the 47th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon-landing mission, the Smithsonian has revealed a stunning high resolution 3D model of the command module'Columbia,' the spacecraft that carried astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin'Buzz' Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon. As one of the most sophisticated scans ever made of a historic artifact, researchers at the Smithsonian employed seven different scanning technologies to capture nearly 1 trillion high-resolution measurements, producing more than a terabyte of compressed data.