It's a weird feeling, cruising around Silicon Valley in a car driven by no one. I am in the back seat of one of Google's self-driving cars – a converted Lexus SUV with lasers, radar and low-res cameras strapped to the roof and fenders – as it maneuvers the streets of Mountain View, California, not far from Google's headquarters. I grew up about five miles from here and remember riding around on these same streets on a Schwinn Sting-Ray. Now, I am riding an algorithm, you might say – a mathematical equation, which, written as computer code, controls the Lexus. The car does not feel dangerous, nor does it feel like it is being driven by a human. It rolls to a full stop at stop signs (something no Californian ever does), veers too far away from a delivery van, taps the brakes for no apparent reason as we pass a line of parked cars. I wonder if the flaw is in me, not the car: Is it reacting to something I can't see? The car is capable of detecting the motion of a cat, or a car crossing the street hundreds of yards away in any direction, day or night (snow and fog can be another matter). "It sees much better than a human being," Dmitri Dolgov, the lead software engineer for Google's self-driving-car project, says proudly. He is sitting behind the wheel, his hands on his lap. As we stop at the intersection, waiting for a left turn, I glance over at a laptop in the passenger seat that provides a real-time look at how the car interprets its surroundings. On it, I see a gridlike world of colorful objects – cars, trucks, bicyclists, pedestrians – drifting by in a video-game-like tableau. Each sensor offers a different view – the lasers provide three-dimensional depth, the cameras identify road signs, turn signals, colors and lights. The computer in the back processes all this information in real time, gauging the speed of oncoming traffic, making a judgment about when it is OK to make a left turn.

Look at this blurry drone. That's as good a glimpse as we're likely to get for a while. Tossed by the wind, controlled by inexperienced pilots, or just flying at the wrong angle at the wrong time, quadcopters crash into their surroundings. While these crashes aren't a major risk to life and limb, they're certainly an obstacle to better drone use: No one wants to rely on a flying machine that crashes into obstacles. We've seen many proposed drone systems with some form of "sense and avoid" before, most recently DJI's Phantom 4, but none as elegant as the Skydio.

New drone footage has captured the growing pile of lifejackets abandoned by migrants after reaching the Greek island of Lesbos. It is now more than three metres deep in some places, with boats being added to the pile.

Drone images accumulate much faster than they can be analyzed. Researchers have developed a new approach that combines crowdsourcing and machine learning to speed up the process. Who would win in a real-life game of "Where's Waldo," humans or computers? A recent study suggests that when speed and accuracy are critical, an approach combing both human and machine intelligence would take the prize. With drones being used to monitor everything natural disaster sites, pollution, or wildlife populations, analyzing drone images in real-time has become a critically important big data challenge. Publishing in the journal Big Data, researchers, including Stéphane Joost from EPFL, present a new approach to rapidly interpret aerial images taken by camera drones that combines human crowdsourcing and machine learning.

Every time we post about autonomous delivery drones, we have to point out that despite the promises implied by overproduced and optimistic videos, the drones are simply not capable of autonomous navigation in complex environments. Same goes for those camera drones that promise to follow you: the videos inevitably show them following skiers on wide open slopes, surfers on the wide open sea, or other people doing things very far away from inconvenient obstacles like trees. So far, we've only seen a tiny handful of drones capable of dynamically detecting and avoiding obstacles at a useful speed. Qualcomm and UPenn have been working on some, and MIT has that speedy tree-avoiding fixed-wing drone. A Silicon Valley company called Skydio, founded by a team of researchers from MIT and Google X's Project Wing, have posted a video that shows a drone following people jogging and biking while autonomously avoiding tree trunks and branches.

An anti-tank missile fires by an Iraqi CH-4 drone destroys an ISIS artillery piece, seen in footage captured by the drone's onboard, retractable sensor turret. China's armed CH-3 and CH-4 drones have recently made international news, being used by nations that range from Iraq to Nigeria. And now NORINCO, one of China's leading defense contractors, is getting in on the international drone export game, showing off a new armed drone helicopter. The Sky Saker H300, seen here in Dubai, is China's first helicopter UCAV. Being cheaper and easier to use then larger UCAVs like the Reaper and CH-4, it could become a battalion and company level UCAV for on demand air strikes.

A near miss between a drone and a Lufthansa aircraft landing at Los Angeles International Airport may give impetus to moves to regulate consumer drones more closely, including by using technologies like geofencing. "This is one more incident that could have brought down an airliner, and it's completely unacceptable. A near-miss of 200 feet should serve as a stark reminder of the dangers posed by reckless drone use," said Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California, in a statement. The senator said the Senate must pass legislation she introduced last year, called the Consumer Drone Safety Act, which would require safety features for consumer drones and strengthen the federal laws that govern their operation. The bill would, among other things, direct the Federal Aviation Administration to require safety features for newly manufactured consumer drones, such as geofencing to govern the altitude and location of flights and collision-avoidance software.

Say what you will about civilian drones and drone pilots, but when the going gets tough, these drone pilots will get going. According to published Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) commercial drone exemption requests, a big chunk of drone pilots are willing to lend a hand for possible emergencies. A total of 19 percent mentioned emergency services--that's six times as many requests from the last quarter of 2015. With all these pilots willingly to help out in case of emergencies, this could mean that private pilots can easily aid officials during search and rescue missions and other equally critical emergency scenarios. Despite this magnanimous offer to lend a hand, it doesn't necessarily guarantee pilots flying time. Certain legal restrictions may keep them on the ground– according to an FAA spokeswoman who spoke to The Verge, "a civilian must have a 333 exemption" to participate in emergency services.

The Diet on Thursday enacted a law banning drones from flying over important facilities such as the Prime Minister's Office while giving police the power to destroy drones if necessary. The legislation is expected to take effect before a foreign ministerial meeting of the Group of Seven industrial nations takes place in Hiroshima on April 11-12. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ruling coalition had been seeking early enactment of the bill to strengthen anti-terrorism measures ahead of the G-7 summit in Mie Prefecture in late May. The Civil Aeronautics Law was revised to regulate drone flights in September after a small drone was found on the roof of the building housing the Prime Minister's Office last April. A man was later convicted over the incident.

The pilot of a Lufthansa passenger jumbo jet has reported that a drone aircraft nearly collided with his airliner on its landing approach to Los Angeles, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. The close encounter between the wide-body, four-engine Airbus A380 and the drone occurred at about 1.30pm at an altitude of 5,000ft (152 metres) as the unmanned aircraft passed about 200ft (61 meters) over the Lufthansa flight 14 miles (22.5 km) east of the city's international airport, the FAA said. No evasive action was taken by the airline crew, and the plane, Lufthansa Flight 456, safely made its landing minutes later without further incident, according to FAA spokesman Ian Gregor. The FAA immediately alerted the Los Angeles police department's air support division. The number of passengers and crew aboard the plane was not reported by authorities, nor was the flight's origin.