"There are a number of seagrass monitoring programs that work on regional and to some degree on global scales, but most of them are really only looking at the cover and the abundance of the seagrass itself," said Emmett Duffy, director of the Marine Global Earth Observatories (MarineGEO) headquartered at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. The new grant builds on collaborative work by the Zostera Experimental Network (ZEN), led by Duffy, and will look at how climate, biodiversity and other environmental aspects can change the course of the disease. The team is deploying a wide arsenal of weapons to understand it: In addition to marine biologists, they are bringing on geographers, computer scientists, artificial intelligence and drones. Seagrasses are among the most valuable ecosystems on Earth. They provide habitat for popular fish like salmon and herring, protect shorelines from erosion and filter out nutrient pollution.

SAPPORO – A Hokkaido newspaper company tested delivery by drone on Friday to determine whether the unmanned aircraft can be relied on to bring news to the public in times of disaster. Two weeks after a level 7 earthquake caused deadly landslides and a prefecture-wide blackout, a group comprising operators of the daily Hokkaido Shimbun's delivery shops successfully flew a drone carrying 10 copies of its newspaper 200 meters across a river in the city of Asahikawa under a hypothetical scenario in which a major quake damages a bridge and severs roads. The magnitude 6.7 quake on Sept. 6 triggered landslides that engulfed homes and shattered roads, while the blackout cut off access to information via TV, computers and mobile devices. "I'm glad we were able to deliver them successfully, as newspapers are an information infrastructure that is necessary when something drastic happens," Takuma Banno, 41-year-old head of the daily's distribution shop in Sapporo, said of the one-minute flight. The idea for the test was hatched in May and planned out before the quake struck.

Despite the ubiquity of drones nowadays, it seems to be generally accepted that learning how to control them properly is just too much work. Consumer drones are increasingly being stuffed full of obstacle-avoidance systems, based on the (likely accurate) assumption that most human pilots are to some degree incompetent. It's not that humans are entirely to blame, because controlling a drone isn't the most intuitive thing in the world, and to make it easier, roboticists have been coming up with all kinds of creative solutions. There's body control, face control, and even brain control, all of which offer various combinations of convenience and capability. The more capability you want in a drone control system, usually the less convenient it is, in that it requires more processing power or infrastructure or brain probes or whatever. Developing a system that's both easy to use and self-contained is quite a challenge, but roboticists from the University of Pennsylvania, U.S. Army Research Laboratory, and New York University are up to it--with just a pair of lightweight gaze-tracking glasses and a small computing unit, a small drone will fly wherever you look.

The new edition of the GoPro, the Hero7 Black, promises video as steady as a drone. Drone footage is as smooth as it gets, and now GoPro wants you to buy its new camera, saying the Hero7 Black edition is as smooth as a drone. What's missing, of course, is the added weight of the 3-axis gimbal that accompanies the drone and steadies the shot. The $399 Hero7 Black, out September 30, is the same tiny size as past GoPro cameras. Instead of using a gimbal, it uses software to steady the shot.

The AlphaPilot challenge asks participants to design AI technology that allows autonomous drones to beat human-piloted drones in a race. Drone racing could soon get a boost from AI. Lockheed Martin, the Drone Racing League and NVIDIA launched a challenge Wednesday called AlphaPilot, which asks participants to create artificial intelligence technology that allows autonomous drones to out-race human-piloted drones. "Put that computing power at the edge, and do it in such a way that it can beat those human pilots who trained months or years to get to that level," Lockheed Martin Chief Technology Officer Keoki Jackson said at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on Wednesday. The challenge opens later this year and the races will be held during the Drone Racing League's new Artificial Intelligence Robotic Racing Circuit starting next year. The grand prize winner will get $1 million.

I think, therefore I fly. Headsets that read brain waves are being used to fly drones, letting us control machines with just our thoughts. A team from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore trained 14 people to control a multirotor drone using commercially available EEG headsets, devices that use small electrodes to test the electrical activity in your brain.

Keller Rinaudo began his career as the cocreator of Romo, a tiny toy robot. But for the past five years his work has been, well, bloodier. His company, Zipline, uses autonomous planes to deliver medical supplies--vaccines, pharmaceuticals, and blood--to hard-to-reach places. It signed its first client, the government of Rwanda, in 2016, and says it now fulfills about a fifth of the blood needs of the country's rural population. Anne Wojcicki, cofounder and CEO of 23andMe, says she was drawn to Rinaudo's "passion, dedication, and laser focus on what he wanted to accomplish."

The high seas are probably the most lawless place left on Earth. They're a portal back in time to the way the world looked for most of our history: fierce and open competition for resources and contested territories. Pirating continues to be a way to make a living. It's not a complete free-for-all--most countries require registration of fishing vessels and enforce environmental protocols. Cooperative agreements between countries oversee fisheries in international waters.

The British installation at the London Design Biennale is an international project that demonstrates how victims of human rights violations around the world can gather proof of their own experiences. Plastic bottles, digital cameras and kites, just some of the low-cost items in the exhibition, are being used in the Sinjar region of northern Iraq to gather the remaining evidence of Isis's 2014 treatment of the Yazidi ethnic minority, treatment that survivors and their supporters have called genocide and hope to prosecute in the international courts. Not only do they say thousands were killed by the terrorist group and thousands more displaced, but Yazidi cultural and religious heritage sites were destroyed and their temples were used as mass graves. Four years later, the region is still dangerous, littered with landmines and booby-traps left by the militants as they retreated. So when Yazda, a global rights organisation established by the Yazidi diaspora, sought help in supplementing their documentation efforts from Forensic Architecture, an independent research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, its team of architects, photographers, software developers, lawyers and archaeologists adapted their investigative methods to provide ways for Yazidis to gather video and data without entering the most hazardous areas.

A novel insect-inspired flying robot, developed by TU Delft researchers from the Micro Air Vehicle Laboratory (MAVLab), is presented in Science (14 September 2018). Experiments with this first autonomous, free-flying and agile flapping-wing robot improves the understanding of how fruit flies control aggressive escape manoeuvres. This enables small natural flyers such as insects to hover close to a flower, but also to escape danger rapidly. Animal flight has always drawn the attention of biologists, who not only study their complex wing motion patterns and aerodynamics, but also their sensory and neuro-motor systems during such agile manoeuvres. Recently, flying animals have also become a source of inspiration for robotics researchers, who try to develop lightweight flying robots that are agile, power-efficient and even scalable to insect sizes.