A.I. takes our Starbucks orders, drives Uber cars, curates our Facebook newsfeeds and pilots unmanned military drones. This year A.I. will write more than half of financial and sports stories. It already writes computer code and has the capability to learn. Would you trust robots to make life and death decisions? How fast will intelligent machines replace people?

U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis (R) greets an airman as he boards a U.S. Air Force C-17 for a day trip to a U.S. military base in Djibouti from Doha, Qatar April 23, 2017. DJIBOUTI -- U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on Sunday visited Djibouti to bolster ties with the tiny and impoverished African country that is home to an important base for U.S. counterterrorism forces, including drones. Mattis, the first Trump administration official to visit Djibouti, planned to meet with President Ismail Omar Guelleh and greet U.S. and French troops. He was accompanied by Marine Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, head of U.S. Africa Command. The U.S. operates drone aircraft from Djibouti for surveillance and combat missions against al-Qaida-affiliated extremists in Somalia and elsewhere in the region.

Agriculture has come a long way in the past century. We produce more food than ever before -- but our current model is unsustainable, and as the world's population rapidly approaches the 8 billion mark, modern food production methods will need a radical transformation if they're going to keep up. But luckily, there's a range of new technologies that might make it possible. In this series, we'll explore some of the innovative new solutions that farmers, scientists, and entrepreneurs are working on to make sure that nobody goes hungry in our increasingly crowded world. In Thomas Malthus' seminal -- though oft criticized -- 1798 work, An Essay on the Principle of Population, the economist took a long view of human history, observing that human populations, when they have an abundance of food, grow until they strain their resources, at which point scarcity sets in.

Scientists filming in the South Ocean off the coast of New Zealand captured this stunning footage of a blue whale eating a mass of krill. When you weigh 200 tons, even the smallest body movements require a lot of energy. That's why blue whales, Earth's largest animal, are picky eaters. Stunning new drone footage shows exactly how these massive mammals maneuver to feed on only the most nutritious patches of krill--providing insight on how they make these choices. Captured by a research team led by National Geographic Explorer Leigh Torres from Oregon State's Marine Mammal Institute, footage filmed in the Southern Ocean near New Zealand shows the moment a whale spots a patch of krill and sizes up whether it's worth expending energy.

A drone that can spot sharks and warn people has been developed by Australian researchers. The battery powered, unmanned drone uses an artificial intelligence technology to identify sharks and send out a safety warning through a megaphone. The drones will be used to patrol many main beaches in Australia from the summer of 2017 or 2018. The battery powered, unmanned drones uses an artificial intelligence technology to identify sharks and send out a safety warning through a megaphone. The drone works via real time analysis of overhead footage, and information can be relayed immediately to emergency services, beach lifeguards and beach users to help make safe decisions about getting into the water.

Flying a drone into the flying rocks and ash of an erupting volcano seems like a guaranteed way of ensuring you'll never see it again, but a team of researchers from the Universities of Bristol and Cambridge have so far benefited in a big way from such missions. They've been using several bespoke fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to help them learn more about how and why volcanos erupt. Sending its sensor-laden flying machine over a highly active volcano in Guatemala recently, the team has been able to take accurate temperature, humidity, and thermal measurements from within the ash cloud itself. Most spectacular, however, is the footage (above) captured by the drone's camera as it soars high above the volcano and flies directly through the mass of material ejected into the sky above. The remotely controlled aircraft was flown successfully beyond the line of sight at distances of up to 5 miles (8 km) away, and at 10,000 feet above the launch site.

Bat-detecting drones could help us find out what the animals get up to when flying. Ultrasonic detectors on drones in the air and on the water are listening in on bat calls, in the hope of discovering more about the mammals' lives beyond the reach of ground-based monitoring devices. Drone-builder Tom Moore and bat enthusiast Tom August have developed three different drones to listen for bat calls while patrolling a pre-planned route. Since launching the scheme, known as Project Erebus, in 2014, they have experimented with two flying drones and one motorised boat, all equipped with ultrasonic detectors. The pair's latest tests have demonstrated the detection capabilities of the two airborne drone models: a quadcopter and a fixed-wing drone. Last month, the quadcopter successfully followed a predetermined course and picked up simulated bat calls produced by an ultrasonic transmitter.

Rules governing the use of food delivery robots remain to be seen across the US. But major food businesses are investigating the possibilities already. In the latest deal, Yelp Eat24 has begun testing delivery by robot in partnership with Marble in select San Francisco neighborhoods. TechCrunch spied Marble's delivery robots, stickered with a Yelp Eat24 logo, earlier this month. But the companies announced their robot delivery service officially today.

The DJI Mavic Pro is a small yet powerful drone that turns the sky into your creative canvass easily and without worry, helping you make every moment an aerial moment. Its compact size hides a high degree of complexity that makes it one of DJI's most sophisticated flying cameras ever. FROM YOUR POCKET OcuSync is an all new DJI designed long range transmission technology capable of up to 4.3mi (7km)* of transmission range, HD 720p long range, and Full HD 1080p short range video streaming - far surpassing the capabilities of any Wi-Fi transmission system. Every time you fly, OcuSync scans a range of available frequencies to find and use the one with the least interference to give you more reliability and control. Tightly integrated with DJI GO, OcuSync transfers vital statistics of the Mavic to you in real time, and can also be used to download photos and videos while you fly at a maximum speed of up to 40Mb/s. NO BUMPS AND SCRAPES An unprotected drone could hit obstacles during long distance flight or when descending from an inadequate height in Return to Home mode.

The densification of small-cell base stations in a 5G architecture is a promising approach to enhance the coverage area and facilitate the ever increasing capacity demand of end users. However, the bottleneck is an intelligent management of a backhaul/fronthaul network for these small-cell base stations. This involves efficient association and placement of the backhaul hubs that connects these small-cells with the core network. Terrestrial hubs suffer from an inefficient non line of sight link limitations and unavailability of a proper infrastructure in an urban area. Seeing the popularity of flying platforms, we employ here an idea of using networked flying platform (NFP) such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), drones, unmanned balloons flying at different altitudes, as aerial backhaul hubs. The association problem of these NFP-hubs and small-cell base stations is formulated considering backhaul link and NFP related limitations such as maximum number of supported links and bandwidth. Then, this paper presents an efficient and distributed solution of the designed problem, which performs a greedy search in order to maximize the sum rate of the overall network. A favorable performance is observed via a numerical comparison of our proposed method with optimal exhaustive search algorithm in terms of sum rate and run-time speed.