If Matt Chasen gets his way, there will be a time -- in the not-so-distant future -- when commuters are able to order an air taxi that whisks them across town in minutes, bypassing traffic-clogged streets below. For now, however, the chief executive of LIFT Aircraft will have to use his start-up's electric-powered vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft, the Hexa, for something else: 15-minute flights across a lake outside Austin, for $249 a pop. Though the flights will target a recreational crowd, Chasen sees them as a steppingstone to a new form of convenient urban transportation. "Today's regulatory environment does not allow for a transportation use of these aircraft -- yet," said Chasen, a former Boeing engineer with a background in mechanical and aerospace engineering. "We'll build public trust in the technology. Once that happens, it's inevitable that people will want to use it for certain types of commuting flights."

Last July, photographer Reuben Wu and a crew of around 30 people hiked from the Peruvian city of Huaraz, nestled in the Cordillera Blanca region of the Andes, to the 16,000-foot-high Pastoruri glacier. The hike took around four hours and the crew arrived after sunset, finding the melting glacier lit only by a full moon. These Stitched Photos of Greenland's Icebergs Are Sew Great Wu has shot conceptual landscape photography in some of the world's most remote locations--East Java, Patagonia, Chile's Atacama Desert, Norway's Svalbard Archipelago--but this shoot, part of a mini-documentary about Wu's photography done as part of a Coors Light ad campaign, gave him the opportunity to highlight global warming by photographing a fast-receding glacier, one of the last in South America. "There were parts of the glacier where you could see evidence of pretty extreme breakdown and melting of the snow," Wu says. "Parts of the glacier no longer had the epic, jagged chunks of ice."

Rogue drones "deliberately" flown over one of the UK's busiest airports caused travel chaos this week. Incoming planes were forced to divert to airports up and down the country as the drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), repeatedly appeared over the airfield at London's Gatwick Airport. The situation was so serious the Army was called in to support the local police in tackling the issue, with the runway finally re-opening on Friday morning. For some time now, governments around the world have been looking at different ways of addressing the dangers of drone use in areas where they pose safety risks. Here we look at some of the solutions - ranging from bazookas to eagles.

The person - or people - responsible for flying drones near Gatwick Airport has caused chaos for thousands of passengers. But how serious an offence is being committed? And what punishment could be handed down? Endangering the safety of an aircraft is a criminal offence which can carry a prison sentence of up to five years. The government passed legislation earlier this year making it illegal to fly a drone within 1km of an airport or airfield boundary in the UK.

This morning, we explain what a terrible year cryptocurrency had -- I hope you didn't remortgage your house. Meanwhile, Xbox seems ready to have a strong 2019, and drones plunge one of the UK's biggest airports into chaos. After five years, two mid-generation console releases and a brand-new gamepad...Xbox is poised to dominate the next console generation While the Switch and PS4 are riding high in this console cycle, Microsoft is better positioned than any other video-game company to take control of the coming one, which is expected to kick off in 2020. Living the Marty McFly dream.Nike's first self-lacing basketball shoes go on sale in 2019 for $350 On Nike's quarterly earnings call, executives revealed plans for an'Adaptive' basketball shoe that will cost around $350. That's about $400 cheaper than last year's HyperAdapt trainers, but more expensive than the Jordan XXXIII with its strap the wearer adjusts on their own.

Britain's Gatwick airport has reopened after a rogue drone saboteur wrought travel chaos for hundreds of thousands of Christmas travellers by playing cat-and-mouse with police snipers and the army. After the biggest disruption at Gatwick airport since a volcanic ash cloud in 2010, Britain's second-busiest airport said on Friday its runway was open and that a limited number of aircraft were scheduled for departure and arrival. "Gatwick's runway is currently available and a limited number of aircraft are scheduled for departure and arrival," the airport said. "Gatwick continues to advise passengers to check the status of their flight with their airline before travelling to the airport as departures and arrivals will be subject to delays and cancellations." Gatwick said 700 planes were due to take off on Friday, although there would still be delays and cancellations.

Earlier this month, an intergovernmental conference in Marrakesh, Morocco brought together leaders from around the world to address global migration. After two days of deliberations, some 150 nations signed the Global Compact for Migration (GCM) agreement, which called for the implementation of more humane policies to ensure "safe, orderly and regular migration". But the conference and the agreement were very much a platform for Western doublespeak and hypocrisy. European countries and the United States are by far not concerned with the "safety" of migrants and refugees heading for their borders. In fact, the border security industry in Europe and the US is thriving and in both places, Israel with its infamous militarised security policies is serving as a role model and a major technology supplier.

Aeromexico Flight 773 from Guadalajara was just about to land last week when crew members heard a "pretty loud bang," according to a cabin recording. A mysterious aerial collision had left the nose of the passenger jet badly mangled. By the time it landed safely in Tijuana, there was no confirmed culprit but one likely suspect: a drone. If confirmed, the incident would represent one of a very small but growing number of mid-air crashes involving the small flying robots. The potential for tragic accidents--or deliberate attacks--has grown as drones have proliferated among hobbyists and businesses.

This paper addresses the Traveling Salesman Problem with Drone (TSP-D), in which a truck and drone are used to deliver parcels to customers. The objective of this problem is to either minimize the total operational cost (min-cost TSP-D) or minimize the completion time for the truck and drone (min-time TSP-D). This problem has gained a lot of attention in the last few years since it is matched with the recent trends in a new delivery method among logistics companies. To solve the TSP-D, we propose a hybrid genetic search with dynamic population management and adaptive diversity control based on a split algorithm, problem-tailored crossover and local search operators, a new restore method to advance the convergence and an adaptive penalization mechanism to dynamically balance the search between feasible/infeasible solutions. The computational results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing methods in terms of solution quality and improves best known solutions found in the literature. Moreover, various analyses on the impacts of crossover choice and heuristic components have been conducted to analysis further their sensitivity to the performance of our method.

Don't fly near airports or airfields. Remember to stay below 400ft (120m).