Battlefield drones are evolving quickly, and there's only so much militaries can do to keep up -- they're not used to competing with consumer tech that can improve in a matter of months. To that end, US Special Operations Command (aka SOCOM) is taking the unusual step of opening a drone hacker lab in Tampa, Florida. The organization's James Geurts hopes this tinkerer mindset will help special forces "get out in front" of future threats that could easily prove overwhelming, such as drone swarms. There are also more direct problems to solve, such as balancing weapon payloads and portability. You may need a drone bigger than something like the tiny, kamikaze-oriented AeroVironment Switchblade (above) to take down a target, but you can't always field more conventional runway-bound drones to do the job.

In March, the FAA noted that over 100,000 hobby drone owners had registered their machines since the year began, bringing the total in the US over 770,000. Owners have filed their non-commercial UAVs with the agency ever since the DoT passed a law in December 2015 that made registration mandatory. But a Washington, D.C. court has struck down that legislation, freeing just-for-fun drone owners from notifying the government of their purchases -- for good and ill. Model aircraft enthusiast John Taylor brought his case against the FAA back in January 2016, shortly after the regulations came in place. The DC court of appeals ruled (PDF) in his favor, effectively classifying non-commercial drones as model aircraft and subject to the FAA's 2012 Modernization and Reform Act, which prohibited the agency from making new laws restricting flying hobbyist craft. But the drone industry isn't celebrating this turn: Turns out, keeping track of owners and making sure they're trained to fly was useful for everyone.

An appeals court on Friday struck down a Federal Aviation Administration rule that required owners of drones used for recreation to register their craft. The ruling was a victory for hobbyists and a setback for the FAA, which cited safety concerns as it tried to tighten regulation of the fast-growing army of drone operators. Some pilots of commercial airliners have reported close calls with drones flying near airports. About 760,000 hobbyists have registered more than 1.6 million drones since 2015, and sales have skyrocketed. The FAA estimates that hobbyists will buy 2.3 million drones this year and 13 million by the end of 2020.

I use mine to make simple videos and annoy my dog. Drones are quite popular these days, and you can get a nice one without spending too much money. Oh, I'm talking about the remotely controlled flying vehicles with four rotors, not the bigger drones scientists use to study climate change and stuff. Small drones like mine are easy to fly--a skilled pilot can hover and fly in just about any direction, which makes them great for recording video. But how does a drone actually fly? Ah, this is an excellent opportunity to look at some physics.

Over the last few years we've seen more camera drones than we can count, but getting the best footage out of them will take something extra. While many big budget productions are already using drone cameras, a system developed by MIT and ETH Zurich researchers goes beyond mere Steadicam or even subject-tracking, by allowing the director to define exactly how a shot is framed. Specifically, it lets operators specify where an object or face should be in the frame, which direction it should face and how large it will appear, while also accounting for obstacles in the environment. That way the drone can calculate an appropriate flight path on its own, weighing the various factors against each other to get the best shot each time. The researchers will present their findings at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation later this month, but for now, directors will have to keep begging Roger Deakins to shoot their next project.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan on Thursday lodged a protest with China after four Chinese coastguard vessels entered what Tokyo considers its territorial waters near disputed East China Sea islets and a drone-like object flew near one ship, the Japanese government said.

Narwhal tusks have long fascinated Inuits but there has never been scientific evidence for how they are actually used. Well, drone footage has finally confirmed one useof these strange extensions. In a short clip, a narwhal is shown striking, stunning, and eating a small fish -- the first time such behavior has been captured on tape. "We know narwhals come in an out of the fjords in the summer but its not totally clear what they do, Marianne Marcoux, one of the scientists who worked on the study, told Digital Trends. "The drone allows us to get a new vantage point without disturbing the animals.

Prisons have a drone problem, in that they're being used to fly drugs and other contraband over walls and into the hands of inmates. Dealing with these airborne mules is tricky because you either need to hope they crash or catch their operators in the act, but one prison is taking a more proactive approach to stopping undesirable deliveries. Alongside other security upgrades, the small, 139-capacity Les Nicolles Prison in Guernsey, Channel Islands, is said to be the first in the world to receive an anti-drone fence. It's not a physical barrier, but an invisible wall that jams pilot signals and stops drones from passing beyond its threshold. Two British companies, Drone Defence and Eclipse Digital Solutions, adapted existing jamming technology to create the "Sky Fence."

Most aircraft are designed to be very good at going upwards, and also not bad at going forwards, with some relatively small amount of thought given to turning left and right. Thanks to gravity, downwards is usually taken care of. Even aircraft designed to hover, like helicopters and quadrotors, have preferential directions of orientation and travel where their particular arrangement of motors and control surfaces makes them most effective. ETH Zurich's Omnicopter goes about flying in a totally different way. With eight motors oriented in all directions, the Omnicopter doesn't have an up or down or front or back: It can translate and rotate in any direction, letting it play a very skilled game of fetch. We have developed a computationally efficient trajectory generator for six degrees-of-freedom multirotor vehicles, i.e. vehicles that can independently control their position and attitude.

Americans aren't the only ones who have to register their drones. China's Civil Aviation Authority has announced that pilots will have to register any robotic flier heavier than 0.55 pounds starting on June 1st. Online registration will open up on May 18th, and the government will start publishing no-fly zone data for civilian airports on the same day. It's hoping that drone makers will use the info to implement geofencing that prevents drones from venturing into dangerous areas. The initiative will also see regulators working with local government and police to curb drone interference, and will eventually standardize commercial drone use with four main categories: aerial photography, agricultural use, aviation photography and license training.