Tesla makes the world's best electric cars - but they're not content to rest on their laurels. The company just launched a powerful new battery that makes the Model S the fastest production car you can actually buy. Meanwhile, autonomous vehicle startup nuTonomy has beat Uber to the punch by launching the world's first fleet of self-driving taxis in Singapore. The MIT Climate CoLab awarded honors to a new elevated Caterpillar Train that soars over traffic jams. And in Europe, Paris is planning to go completely car-free for an entire day this September, and we spotted an awesome pedal-powered school bus on the streets of the Netherlands.

Sometimes, smaller is better, especially with robots. That's what researchers developing mini-robots have in mind. Robots that cost 10 to 100 are cheaper to make and more useful to deploy in emergency situations than big robots with limited mobility. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are developing sophisticated robots that are up to 10 centimeters long, and can run, climb, fly, and communicate with emergency personnel. Once the multi-leg robots serve their purpose, they can be disposed of without regrets.

Famous Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, who is credited as the author of the famous war strategy guidebook Art of War had said; "know thy self, know thy enemy. Those words were from the 5th century BC. The'art of war' in the 21st century is drastically different. So much so that Christopher Coker, professor at the London School of Economics and author of Warrior Geeks in a 2013 piece declared that technology, in fact, is now making man the weakest link in warfare. India is also now looking to get into the world of advanced drone warfare. New Delhi has shown renewed interest in buying some of the top US-made drones currently proving their worth for the American military around the world.

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Human-robot strike teams, autonomous land mines, and covert swarms of minuscule robotic spies: the US Department of Defense's idea of the future of war seems like a sci-fi movie. In a report that dreams of new ways to destroy adversaries and protect American assets in equal portions, the DOD's science research division cements the idea that artificial intelligence and autonomous robotic systems will be a crucial part of the nation's ongoing defense strategy. US military already uses a host of robotic systems in the battlefield, from reconnaissance and attack drones to bomb disposal robots. However, these are all remotely-piloted systems, meaning a human has a high level of control over the machine's actions at all times. The new DOD report sees tactical advantages from humans and purely self-driven machines working together in the field.

Aptonomy Inc. has developed drone technology that could make prison breaks, robberies or malicious intrusions of any kind impossible for mere mortals. Dubbing it a kind of "flying security guard," the company has built its systems on top of a drone often used by movie-makers, the DJI S-1000, a camera-carrying octocopter. To that skeleton, Aptonomy adds a new flight controller, and second computer to power day- and night-vision cameras, bright lights, and loudspeakers, among other things. And more importantly than the hardware features, Aptonomy has developed artificial intelligence and navigational systems that allow its drones to fly low and fast, avoiding obstacles in structure-dense environments, and detecting human activity or faces in the area, autonomously. A user can open up a browser, get onto the Aptonomy interface, click on a point on a map to send out a drone to a particular location, then watch that flight in real time, or review a recording of it later.

In my last post on the future of cutting tools, I discussed a vision and roadmap document that I created and refined over the years. This roadmap was created by imagining what perfection (or utopia) looked like utilizing what we know to be technically possible today. It was a glimpse into a futuristic system for handling cutting tools in machining operations including robotic automation, copious amounts of data, and artificial intelligence in the form of machine learning. Today, I'm going to describe a vision for a futuristic production management system where data silos do not exist, predictive analytics provide glimpses into the future, and algorithms optimize throughput to balance costs and demand. Frequently, production decisions are made with partial information and what may seem like the "optimal" solution on a local-level creates costly disturbances on the macro-level.

Last month I examined how machine learning could be used to detect low and slow insider threats. In this, the final installment of my trilogy on real-world use cases from the recent Verizon Data Breach Digest, I'll discuss how remote access threats can be exposed with the machine learning techniques I've covered in my two previous blogs. In this example, a manufacturing company experienced a breach of a shared engineering work station in its R&D department. A phishing email resulted in a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) backdoor being downloaded onto the system, which enabled the threat actors to escalate privileges and capture user credentials for everyone who had used the system. By the time the breach was discovered, a significant amount of information had been leaked out via FTP to a foreign IP address.

A very, very small quadcopter, one inch in diameter can carry a one- or two-gram shaped charge. You can order them from a drone manufacturer in China. You can program the code to say: "Here are thousands of photographs of the kinds of things I want to target." A one-gram shaped charge can punch a hole in nine millimeters of steel, so presumably you can also punch a hole in someone's head. You can fit about three million of those in a semi-tractor-trailer. You can drive up I-95 with three trucks and have 10 million weapons attacking New York City. They don't have to be very effective, only 5 or 10% of them have to find the target. There will be manufacturers producing millions of these weapons that people will be able to buy just like you can buy guns now, except millions of guns don't matter unless you have a million soldiers. You need only three guys to write the program and launch them. So you can just imagine that in many parts of the world humans will be hunted. They will be cowering underground in shelters and devising techniques so that they don't get detected. This is the ever-present cloud of lethal autonomous weapons. Mary Wareham laughs a lot. It usually sounds the same regardless of the circumstance -- like a mirthful giggle the blonde New Zealander can't suppress -- but it bubbles up at the most varied moments. Wareham laughs when things are funny, she laughs when things are awkward, she laughs when she disagrees with you. And she laughs when things are truly unpleasant, like when you're talking to her about how humanity might soon be annihilated by killer robots and the world is doing nothing to stop it. One afternoon this spring at the United Nations in Geneva, I sat behind Wareham in a large wood-paneled, beige-carpeted assembly room that hosted the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), a group of 121 countries that have signed the agreement to restrict weapons that "are considered to cause unnecessary or unjustifiable suffering to combatants or to affect civilians indiscriminately"-- in other words, weapons humanity deems too cruel to use in war. The UN moves at a glacial pace, but the CCW is even worse.

Our future robot overlords never looked so squishy. A team of scientists led out of Harvard University have managed to build an entirely soft robot -- one that's inspired by an octopus. The octobot, described this week in the journal Nature, could pave the way toward more effective soft robots that could be used in search and rescue, exploration and to more safely interact with humans. "The octobot is a minimal system designed to demonstrate our integrated design and fabrication strategy," the study authors wrote, "which may serve as a foundation for a new generation of completely soft, autonomous robots." Traditionally, robots have been seen as stiff, angular entities, made of metal and other rigid materials (think C3PO in Star Wars).