In December, NASA announced two finalist concepts for a robotic mission that will launch in the mid-2020s. The first is the Comet Astrobiology Exploration Sample Return (CAESAR), which would send a fairly conventional spacecraft over to a comet to grab a chunk of its nucleus and bring it back to Earth. That's cool and all, but we're much more excited about the second finalist concept: Dragonfly, from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab (APL), a quad octocopter that would explore Saturn's moon Titan from the air. The idea is that it would work like a planetary rover, except that it would fly instead of drive, allowing it to cover much more ground at the risk of, you know, crashing. We've seen lots of drones that can do amazing things, and also lots of drones that crash very, very badly while trying to do amazing things. Sending a fully autonomous flying robot to an alien world over a billion kilometers away and expecting it to fly around for a couple years without any human intervention seems extraordinarily ambitious, so we checked in with APL to see exactly what they're working on.

Hot on the heels that GoPro is firing up to 300 people and pulling out of the drone business is the news that the company may put itself up for sale. CNBC is reporting that the action-camera maker has enlisted the services of JPMorgan Chase to help it find a potential buyer. Earlier in the day, the outlet reported that CEO Nick Woodman would "look at" opportunities to "unite with a bigger parent company." At this time, it's not clear if other parties are interested or how much it would cost to swallow the brand. We've reached out for comment but have yet to hear back from GoPro or any of its representatives, and the rumor may be little more than a fever dream.

Camera maker GoPro Inc. is getting out of the drone business, laying off more than 20% of its workforce and losing two executives after predicting a sharp decline in its fourth-quarter revenue and disclosing weak holiday-season demand for its cameras. The disappointing outlook sent shares plummeting nearly 30% to an all-time low of $5.32 in morning trading Monday. The company went public at $24 a share in June 2014. The company announced cost-cutting measures that it said would help it save $80 million. Among them are slashing its global workforce from 1,254 employees to fewer than 1,000; reducing GoPro Chief Executive Nicholas Woodman's cash compensation to $1 (it was $800,000 in 2016); and ending production of its aerial drone, named Karma.

At last year's CES, drone newcomer UVify made a splash with its speedy Draco racing quad. So much so, we awarded it the "Best Drone" in the official Best of CES awards. This year, the team is back with a new quadcopter called Oori, and it promises to be just as much fun. Like Draco before it, the focus here is speed, with the needle topping reaching an impressive 50-plus miles an hour. As a micro-quad, Oori is much smaller than Draco -- it'll fit in the palm of your hand.

GoPro still isn't in the best of health, and that's leading it to make some tough decisions about its future. The action camera maker has confirmed that it's cutting nearly 300 jobs (from 1,254 to "fewer than 1,000"), and is exiting the drone market entirely. The Karma drone was the second most popular drone in its price class, GoPro said, but it faced profit margin problems in an "extremely competitive aerial market. Combine that with a "hostile regulatory environment" in Europe and the US, and the market is expected to shrink to the point where it's "untenable" to compete. The company will sell what's left of its Karma inventory, and plans to continue supporting drones.

Jeanne Pepper Bernstein has been searching for her 19-year-old son since he went missing in Lake Forest last Tuesday. On Sunday afternoon, she had a message for him. "If there's any way you can come home, whatever has happened, wherever you've been, whoever you've talked to -- it doesn't matter," she said in an interview with The Times. "We love you so much that we would give up everything we have to have you back." As she offered her wrenching plea, family and friends used drones to canvass the Foothill Ranch area of Lake Forest, where authorities believe Blaze Bernstein was last seen by a friend in Borrego Park.

The two biggest societal challenges for the twenty-first century are also the biggest opportunities – automation and climate change. The epitaph of fossil fuels with its dark cloud burning a hole in the ozone layer is giving way to a rise of solar and wind farms worldwide. Servicing these plantations are fleets of robots and drones, providing greater possibilities of expanding CleanTech to the most remote regions of the planet. As 2017 comes to end, the solar industry for the first time in ten years has plateaued due to the proposed budget cuts by the Trump administration. Solar has had quite a run with an average annual growth rate of more than 65% for the past decade promoted largely by federal subsidies.

La Vista Police Chief Bob Lausten said drones have helped his department photograph crime scenes without a helicopter and scout homes before serving high-risk search warrants. Officers recently relied on a drone to locate children who had run away from home, he said. In October, they used it to reconstruct a crash involving a cement mixer that overturned and killed two Omaha men.

The Dutch engineer behind the idea for circular runways at airports has revealed plans to build a test runway for unmanned delivery drones. Henk Hesselink is collaborating with Valkenburg airport, a disused naval base near The Hague, which has ambitions to become a drone innovation centre. His design for circular runways at passenger airports captured global attention last year, in aviation circles and on social media. The point, he explained, was to make more efficient use of space, reduce tricky crosswind landings and cut down on noise pollution. Mr Hesselink, a senior research and development manager at the Netherlands Aerospace Centre, says growing demand for drone delivery services will call for "a network of drones, surfing distribution centres".

My first hands-on experience with a drone goes back to summer of 2012 when I visited my little cousin in Cincinnati. It was what he called a quadcopter. My cousin would place it on his palm and launch it from there with an Xbox-type-controller. It could easily go around the neighborhood, making rounds near the lake before settling back on my cousin's palm. It had a rotating camera with which he used to spy on his brother and complain their mother.