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Oil tanker off Syria coast on fire; government says drone attack

FOX News

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Syria's oil ministry said a fire has erupted in a tanker on its coast after what it said was a suspected drone attack on Saturday. The official state news agency said the fire in the oil tanker outside Baniyas refinery has been extinguished. The oil ministry said the fire started after a suspected drone attack that originated from the Lebanese territorial waters. It provided no further details and did not specify where the tanker was arriving from.


Hitting the Books: How IBM's metadata research made US drones even deadlier

Engadget

If there's one thing the United States military gets right, it's lethality. Yet even once the US military has you in its sights, it may not know who you actually are -- such are, these so-called "signature strikes" -- even as that wrathful finger of God is called down from upon on high. As Kate Crawford, Microsoft Research principal and co-founder of the AI Now Institute at NYU, lays out in this fascinating excerpt from her new book, Atlas of AI, the military-industrial complex is alive and well and now leveraging metadata surveillance scores derived by IBM to decide which home/commute/gender reveal party to drone strike next. And if you think that same insidious technology isn't already trickling down to infest the domestic economy, I have a credit score to sell you. Excerpted from Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Kate Crawford, published by Yale University Press.


ULTRA-SWARM: Creating digital twins of UAV swarms for firefighting and aid delivery

Robohub

For my PhD, I'm studying how global problems such as wildfires and aid delivery in remote areas can benefit from innovative technologies such as UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) swarms. Every year, vast areas of forests are destroyed due to wildfires. Wildfires occur more frequently as climate change induces extreme weather conditions. As a result, wildfires are often larger and more intense. Over the past 5 years, countries around the globe witnessed unprecedented effects of wildfires.


NASA Lands Ingenuity, the First Ever Mars Helicopter

WIRED

Very early this morning, NASA flew a small drone helicopter that its latest rover had toted to Mars, marking humankind's first controlled and powered flight on another planet. Ingenuity stuck the landing--and space engineers are stoked. Ingenuity ascended about one meter per second, until it rose three meters--about 10 feet above Mars. The helicopter hung as evenly as its state-of-the-art electronics could allow, and then landed where it had been 40 seconds before. Then, Ingenuity pinged its Earth-bound engineers a message they've sought for almost a decade: Mission accomplished.


Attack of the drones: the mystery of disappearing swarms in the US midwest

The Guardian

At twilight on New Year's Eve, 2020, Placido Montoya, 35, a plumber from Fort Morgan, Colorado, was driving to work. Ahead of him he noticed blinking lights in the sky. He'd heard rumours of mysterious drones, whispers in his local community, but now he was seeing them with his own eyes. In the early morning gloom, it was hard to make out how big the lights were and how many were hovering above him. But one thing was clear to Montoya: he needed to give chase.


The Morning After: Touring Mercedes' very luxurious EV

Engadget

This "S-Class of EVs" is the first full-electric car from Mercedes to come to the US, combining a low drag coefficient with a large battery pack for a range of 478 miles, using Europe's WLTP estimate. Tesla, Porsche and Audi already have electric luxury sedans, but this looks like an interesting and extremely classy competitor. Roberto Baldwin is ready to walk us through the features and its futuristic interior, which includes a biometric sensor for logging in with voice or fingerprint. There's no word on how much it will cost, and we haven't taken it on the road yet, but I'm already digging its unique taillights and fastback hatch. It's barely been a month since DJI unveiled a new drone, and the company already has another to show.


Drone attack targets Iraqi base that houses US troops

FOX News

'The Ingraham Angle' host examines the president's approach to diplomacy and foreign policy A drone reportedly dropped explosives at a U.S.-led base near the Erbil airport in Iraq on Wednesday night. There were no reports of injuries, Reuters reported, citing Kurdish officials. It was the first known drone attack believed to be targeting U.S. service members but rocket attacks have hit U.S. bases in the country. A Turkish soldier was reportedly killed in a separate rocket attack Wednesday, Turkish officials said, according to Reuters. A group thought to be aligned with Iran praised the drone attack but no one has explicitly claimed responsibility for it. The U.S. has blamed the attacks on Iran-backed militias, which have called for the withdrawal of all foreign troops, according to Reuters.


DJI unveils the Air 2S drone with 20-megapixel camera

Engadget

It's barely been a month since DJI unveiled a new drone, and the company already has another to show. Note the absence of the Mavic branding, indicating we might be seeing more of a shift in how the company pitches each level of quadcopter it offers. It's not clear if the "S" branding here is an Apple-style upgrade to the previous model, but the Air 2S certainly looks like someone gave the previous model a light facelift. The design seems near-identical bar a few smoother lines and an extra pair of front obstacle avoidance cameras. But what's important here is the camera it seems.


DJI's New Drone Makes Aerial Cinematography a Breeze

WIRED

DJI has a new drone, the Air 2S, and it's one of the best drones I've ever flown. The Air 2S is externally nearly identical to last year's Mavic Air 2. It even uses the same batteries, which makes upgrading a little cheaper. There are some very welcome changes in this update. The Air 2S adds an object detection camera to the top of the drone, which improves the collision avoidance system. It really helps when you're flying toward something at high speed, since the drone pitches forward, rendering the front sensor slightly less effective.


Microwave weapon could disable a swarm of military attack drones

New Scientist

Military drones can resist radio-jamming anti-drone devices, but a microwave weapon could take down a whole swarm at once, or disable just one with sniper-like precision