France will help with the United Arab Emirates' air defence system after a series of ballistic missile and drone attacks launched from Yemen by the Houthi rebels on the Gulf country, its defence minister said on Friday. Paris has close economic and political ties with Abu Dhabi and has a permanent military base in the Emirati capital. It sealed a deal in December to sell 80 Rafale fighter jets to the UAE, the largest ever overseas sale of the French warplane. "The United Arab Emirates was victim of serious attacks on its territory in January," Defence Minister Florence Parly tweeted. "In order to show our solidarity with this friendly country, France has decided to provide military support, in particular to protect their airspace against any intrusion."

The drone attack by a little-known armed group in Iraq on the United Arab Emirates (UAE) this week has raised questions about Baghdad's involvement in regional tensions between Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen and the Saudi-led coalition. Alwiyat al-Waad al-Haq (AWH), or the True Promise Brigades, claimed responsibility for the strike on the UAE on Wednesday, saying in a statement it launched "four drones targeting vital facilities in Abu Dhabi" in retaliation for the Emirates' policies in Iraq and Yemen. Several analysts linked the strikes to a shadowy militia Kataib Hezbollah (KH), a powerful Iran-backed Shia armed group in Iraq that has been listed by the United States as a "terrorist organisation". The incident brought to light that the UAE was now being targeted from its north and south, after three recent attacks launched by Houthi rebels in Yemen. Following the drone strikes, Iraqi Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr condemned the attack in a statement, saying some "terrorist outlaws" have dragged Iraq into a "dangerous regional war" by targeting a Gulf state.

President Biden seeks to reenter the Iran nuclear agreement to limit the creation of enriched uranium to make nuclear weapons. In a letter sent to the president of USA Wrestling, Bruce Baumgartner, Iranian wrestler Alireza Dabir wrote, "I am very sorry to announce that the national wrestling team of the Islamic Republic of Iran, due to not granting visas to 6 members of this team, is not able to participate in a friendly match with the U.S. national team." Fox News Digital broke the story in January that Dabir, who obtained a U.S. residency green card, urged the violent destruction of America during an event celebrating the life and work of the U.S.-designated terrorist Qassem Soleimani. Soleimani led the Quds Force, a division of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a U.S.-designated terrorist entity that has been responsible for killing more than 600 American military personnel. He died in a targeted killing in January 2020, slain by an American drone strike in Baghdad.

This new advance, published in the journal Science Robotics, could pave the way for smaller, lighter and more effective micro flying robots for environmental monitoring, search and rescue, and deployment in hazardous environments. Until now, typical micro flying robots have used motors, gears and other complex transmission systems to achieve the up-and-down motion of the wings. This has added complexity, weight and undesired dynamic effects. Taking inspiration from bees and other flying insects, researchers from Bristol's Faculty of Engineering, led by Professor of Robotics Jonathan Rossiter, have successfully demonstrated a direct-drive artificial muscle system, called the Liquid-amplified Zipping Actuator (LAZA), that achieves wing motion using no rotating parts or gears. In the paper, the team show how a pair of LAZA-powered flapping wings can provide more power compared with insect muscle of the same weight, enough to fly a robot across a room at 18 body lengths per second.

As tensions between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Iran-backed Houthi rebels over the war in Yemen continue to rise, a little-known armed group in Iraq has come to the fore. Calling itself Awliyat al-Wa'ad al-Haq, or the True Promise Brigades, the group claimed responsibility for a drone attack on the UAE on Wednesday, saying in a statement that it launched "four drones targeting vital facilities in Abu Dhabi" in retaliation for the Emirates' policies in Iraq and Yemen. The UAE's defence ministry said it had intercepted and destroyed three drones that penetrated the Gulf country's airspace over unpopulated areas on Wednesday. The attack was the latest in a series of aerial assaults on the Gulf state over the past few weeks. The previous three attacks were all claimed by Yemen's Houthi rebels.

A small robot with wings like an insect can fly and generate more power than a similarly sized animal in nature. Most flying robots, whether they use wings or propellers, have motors and gears and transmission systems to connect the components, but these can weigh the robot down and fail. Now, Tim Helps at the University of Bristol, UK, and his colleagues have designed a small robot that uses an electric field – and a droplet of oil that increases the strength of the field – to flap the wings directly, avoiding the need for a motor or a transmission system. Helps and his team tested the mechanism for a million wing flaps and found it had a steady power output that was slightly better than that of an insect muscle of the same weight. "I'm always very excited when we can achieve a better-than-nature power density," says Helps. "It's a rare thing because nature does an amazing job."

Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey's startup Anduril has so far focused on above-ground drones and virtual border walls, but now it's ready to go below the waves. The company has bought Dive Technologies, a startup focusing on autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). Luckey's firm is already offering Dive's existing DIVE-LD AUV as an option. The customizable drone can handle not only military tasks like anti-submarine warfare and undersea combat zone awareness, but peaceful duties like mapping seabeds and oceanographic sensing. This could be as useful for NOAA and commercial ventures as it might be for the Navy, in other words.

Earlier this month, Odense Robotics, in collaboration with Aalborg University, opened a robotics hub in Aalborg, Denmark. The fifth and final hub in the country completes Odense Robotics' national setup. Odense Robotics has already established hubs in Aarhus, Copenhagen, Odense and Sonderborg. The hub will provide robotics, automation and drone startups, scaleups and SMEs with opportunities for growth and innovation. It will work with robotics companies in the northern region of Jutland.

Based on internal employee brainstorming and consistent with the company's "pushing the limits" spirit, it recently injected augmented reality (AR) into this backend process. It allows users to don AR goggles and immerse themselves into the 3D digital environment. AR allows management, an engineering company or an insurance company, often in different locations around the globe, far from the drone pilot and onsite inspection crew, to not only review the asset set for their own purposes in near real time, but to now also virtually transport themselves into the asset first-hand.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), also known as drones, are reinventing businesses as well as creating new ones. Since 2016, the industrial applications of commercial autonomous drones have dramatically increased. The adoption of drone technology has considerably increased during the Covid-19 pandemic. Drones have provided assistance in the healthcare sector for lab sample pickup and delivery as well as transportation and delivery of medical supplies, reducing transportation turnaround and curling the exposure to infection.