One particularly stressful part of using the pre-planned flight modes is that the craft might hit a tree branch of some other overhanging obstacle. In order to combat that, DJI added an infrared sensor to the top of the craft with a range of roughly 25 feet. This is a nice addition because, as many aspiring drone pilots will tell you, the ascent is often more stressful than the descent. Our full review later will report just how nimble this thing is on its own, but in my limited experience so far, it seems like an improvement over the Mavic Air's already-excellent system. Now that it's adept at sensing things that are behind it, the Mavic 2 Zoom also adds a new automated flight mode called Dolly Zoom, which involves zooming in while flying backward to create a unique effect like you see in the movies without worrying about smashing it into your garage, which may or may not be what happened with a previous drone during its review.

Facebook is due to start hiding posts from people who spam users' news feed with clickbait, sensationalised and misinformative articles. In a statement, the social media giant said it was making the update "to reduce low quality links" in users' news feed. Facebook said it carried out research which showed that a small group of users were "routinely sharing vast amounts of public posts per day", which was effectively spamming people's feeds. Hackers can use brainwave signals to steal passwords Government warned of'serious consequences' of extreme internet plans Woman asked to shoot her boyfriend for fame tweeted before video Jean-Claude Juncker admits he doesn't own a smartphone Government warned of'serious consequences' of extreme internet plans The study showed that the same people, who were sharing vast amounts of public posts, were also sharing low quality content. As a result of the research, Facebook said it would "deprioritise" posts being shared from those accounts.

In the first season of Crazy/Genius, The Atlantic's podcast on tech and culture, I asked experts to help me answer some of the hardest questions I could imagine. Would the U.S. economy be better off if the government broke up Amazon? Is smartphone use a behavioral addiction? And, seriously, where are all the aliens? In our upcoming season, the focus shifts from hard questions to radical answers, featuring a ragtag cast of scientists, tinkerers, and artists: a Harvard professor who's convinced that aging is just another curable disease; the chief engineer behind the world's most advanced self-driving car technology; climate scientists who study volcanic eruptions and see a lesson for slowing global warming; a startup couple developing the future of "meat" (it chirps); a concert pianist who plays duets with an algorithm, and whose work might be the future of creativity.

Along with Nikon's new camera, we also have hands-on impressions of some new drones, a supercar and Sony's new Aibo. Sony's robot dog is back, and the new model will arrive in the US later this year. Pre-orders open in September for the $2,899 First Litter Edition with accessories and three years of cloud services included. Devindra Hardawar saw a few of the AI-powered pups at an NYC event and found that "if you're an early adopter, or someone allergic to most animals, it might just fill the fur baby-sized hole in your heart." Yesterday drone behemoth DJI didn't just reveal the Mavic 2 Pro, it also introduced a second option in the line: the Mavic 2 Zoom.

The battle against propaganda bots is an arm's race for our democracy. It's one we may be about to lose. Bots--simple computer scripts--were originally designed to automate repetitive tasks like organizing content or conducting network maintenance, thus sparing humans hours of tedium. Companies and media outlets also use bots to operate social-media accounts, to instantly alert users of breaking news or promote newly published material. But they can also be used to operate large numbers of fake accounts, which makes them ideal for manipulating people.

Humanoid robots are still relatively primitive here in the 21st century. Sure, we have Roombas that can vacuum our floors and Boston Dynamics robots that are doing backflips. But when it comes to the dream of our own personal robot servant, we're still in the Dark Ages. You can't go down to Costco and pick up a fully functional robot butler just yet. But robots were going to do so much more than just give us the opportunity to have our own Rosey from The Jetsons.

The biggest threat to jobs might not be physical robots, but intelligent software agents that can understand our questions and speak to us, integrating seamlessly with all the other programs we use at home and at work. And call centres are particularly at risk. Last week we learned that British retail giant Marks & Spencer is moving 100 switchboard staff to other roles because chatbots are taking over their duties. "All calls to 640 M&S stores and contact centres now handled via Twilio-powered technology," boasted the California-based tech company operating the new system. M&S is now using Twilio's speech recognition software and Google's Dialogflow artificial intelligence (AI) tool to transcribe customers' verbal requests and understand their intent.

When I was 15 I discovered The Smiths, a band whose name had by then long been synonymous with misery. But it was Morrissey's unique style of being miserable – coquettish and laced with Northern English humour, flipping between self-pity and irony – that appealed to my teenage self. I'd always cry at the same points in each song: the end of Hand in Glove, the chord changes before the chorus of Girl Afraid, the line in The Queen is Dead where he sings "we can go for a walk where it's quiet and dry". I'm still not sure why the last one had such an effect. Two decades later, Spotify has built an algorithm that aims to quantify the amount of sadness in a music track.

Do you get down to Jackson Five, or is Stravinsky more your style? Artificial intelligence (AI) that predicts taste in music might seem stranger than fiction, but researchers at Jönköping University in Sweden and Maastricht University in the Netherlands believe they've cracked the code. In a paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org, the team described a system that considers a person's listening behaviors and, using machine learning algorithms and psychological models, infers their "musical sophistication." "Psychological models are increasingly being used to explain … behavioral traces," the team wrote. "The use of domain dependent psychological models allows for more fine-grained identification of behaviors [like music listening] and provide a deeper understanding behind the occurrence of those behaviors."

Apple, a secretive organization staffed by technological visionaries able to predict the future of technology, has ordered a television series based on Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels, an epic saga about … a secretive organization staffed by technological visionaries able to predict the future of technology. There is one major difference between the two: Apple is located on the edge of the continent, while Asimov's tale takes place on the edge of the galaxy. Foundation is considered one of Asimov's masterpieces, right up there with the Robot series, which merged with the Foundation series later in Asimov's career. Unlike some other classic sci-fi, Asimov's work has mostly resisted major studio film adaptation, with only the underwhelming Bicentennial Man in 1999 and I, Robot in 2004 to his name. Asimov's works are quiet and philosophical compared with those of his contemporaries, and Foundation is probably the most challenging one to choose to adapt. Whatever Apple and showrunners David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman decide, the finished product likely won't stick to the structure of the first novel, which consists of five short stories taking place over hundreds of years with no major recurring characters except a dead man whose holographic recordings show up every once in a while in a time capsule.