Happy Valentine's Day! Now that's out of the way, we've got Apple's HomePod review (great sound, not so smart), adorable robot skiers and problems with Star Trek Discovery. The company's first smart speaker sounds great, but is that enough? The company's ethos -- as explained by CEO Tim Cook time and again -- is that Apple cares more about being the best than being first. The $349 HomePod is proof that's not always true. Apple put considerable time and effort into making its first smart speaker sound better than its rivals, and Chris Velazco argues they succeeded.

Those who dream of getting an Amazon package, a prescription drug, or even a beer delivered to their doorsteps via drone might have their wishes fulfilled sooner than expected.

Equipped with a state-of-the-art thermal camera, the drone crisscrossed the field, scanning it for cool, soggy patches where a gopher may have chewed through the buried drip irrigation line and caused a leak. In the drought-prone West, where every drop of water counts, California farmers are in a constant search for ways to efficiently use the increasingly scarce resource. Cannon Michael is putting drone technology to work on his fields at Bowles Farming near Los Banos, 120 miles southeast of San Francisco. About 2,100 companies and individuals have federal permission to fly drones for farming, according to the drone industry's Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. Federal regulators planned to relax the rules Monday on commercial drones, a move that could spur even greater use of such aircraft on farms. Michael is descended from Henry Miller, a renowned cattle rancher, farmer and Western landowner who helped transform semi-arid central California into fertile farmland 150 years ago by building irrigation canals, some still flowing today.

Tue 13 Feb 2018 11.00 EST Last modified on Tue 13 Feb 2018 11.01 EST Drones invoke varying perceptions, from fun gadget to fly in the park to deadly military weapons. In the future, they may even be viewed as a handy tool in the battle to fight climate change. Greenhouse gas emissions from the tra...

Drone delivery is expected to take off big time in the next few years. Chinese online retailer JD.com has already launched drone delivery in four provinces in China, while DHL and Zipline are delivering medicines with drones in rural and hard-to-reach areas. Amazon, Google, and UPS are all working on getting drone delivery service off the ground. There are a lot of issues to think about when it comes to package delivery using drones--safety, privacy, and logistics being some of the main concerns. In a new study, researchers tackle two other important aspects: energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.

If the idea of swarms of delivery drones dropping packages all over our cities started out as a joke, for some reason the punchline hasn't landed yet. Amazon applied for a patent in 2015 for a command center, like a beehive, plopped into your city, which isn't a worrying metaphor at all. Google has its own program in the works, which at least for the moment involves delivering burritos. Again, if this is a joke, it's got a very long fuse. Forget about the insane logistics of such a system for a moment, or if you'd even be keen on drones swarming your town.

Artificially intelligent drones are coming--and they're going to shoot some really sick snowboarding videos along the way. A startup called Skydio is launching the first drone capable of visually imprinting on a person, a bit like a needy duckling, and then following him or her around, deftly navigating around trees, pylons, and other obstacles while shooting video. The new drone, called R1, will be marketed as an easy way to capture action like biking, skiing, or rafting in high-quality video. But Adam Bry, founder and CEO of Skydio, says his company is thinking about how it could be used to inspect roofs for damage and to patrol properties. Aerial vehicles are already being used to inspect buildings, perform security patrols, and tally inventory inside warehouses.

Almost two years ago, a startup called Skydio posted some video of a weird-looking drone autonomously following people as they jogged and biked along paths and around trees. Even without much in the way of detail, this was exciting for three reasons: First, the drone was moving at a useful speed and not crashing into stuff using only onboard sensing and computing, and second, the folks behind Skydio included Adam Bry and Abe Bachrach, who worked on high-speed autonomous flight at MIT before cofounding Project Wing at Google[x] (now just called X). The third reason we were excited about Skydio's drone was that, as much as it looked like a research project, it was actually designed to be commercialized, and today, Skydio is (finally!) And before you think that you've seen flying cameras before, we promise you've never seen anything like the R1: as Bry told us two years ago, Skydio's goal was "to provide a trustworthy and magical experience." Initially, Skydio sent us a couple different videos to show off the new R1.

Autonomous features in commercially available drones are nothing new. Heck, I'm old enough to remember when DJI Phantoms didn't even offer follow-along technology. Shorter version: Most every drone worth its rotors possesses some level of autonomy. The R1 isn't so much a drone as it is a flying, self-positioning action camera. It's sole purpose is to record the person it's following.

Over the course of the next two weeks, there will be dizzying stunts, high-flying acrobatics, and record-breaking heights attained -- oh, and the Olympic athletes will compete, too. The 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang opened in seriously impressive fashion, with more than 1,200 Intel Shooting Star drones serving as the stars of the show. The 1,218 drones set a new Guinness World Record for the most drones flown simultaneously, and Intel notes that its advanced drone technology will be making appearances and "enhance the Olympic Games through 2024." The Intel drones' performance marked the first-ever time that a Winter Olympics' saw a drone light show, and also won recognition as "most unmanned aerial vehicles airborne simultaneously." While the world record flight was actually prerecorded for the event, it doesn't lessen the impressiveness of the feat.