Drones are emerging as one of the asymmetrical threats in the battle for Mosul. A series of Islamic State drone attacks on Iraqi forces fighting to retake the northern Iraqi city have resulted in casualties and a heightened state of alert as ISIS fighters supplement deadly car-bomb attacks with harassing drone strikes using off-the-shelf quad-copters rigged to drop munitions.

Telecommunications firm Verizon has acquired Skyward, a drone operations management company. Skyward develops software for drone operators to manage flight tracking and logging, maintenance scheduling, and contract management. The drone startup will join Verizon's Internet of Things portfolio. Kenya's government has implemented regulations for commercial drone use. The Kenya Civil Aviation Authority will begin allowing businesses to import and use drones for a range of operations.

Incredible drone footage shows a great white shark stalking surfers in Australia. The video shows the shark chasing a surfer off the coastal town of Ballina, New South Wales. Apparently unaware of the predator, the surfer catches a wave and speeds away from the shark. Abandoning its initial pursuit, the shark shifts its attention to another surfer. The second surfer, who is dangling their legs in the water, also appears unaware of the great white's hulking presence.

Today on In Case You Missed It: We explore UPS' plans to deploy hordes of delivery drones and the robots are coming to replace fashion photographers -- body shaming not included. And just in case you've been too busy to keep an eye on your RSS feed, it's time for TL;DR, where we do the week's reading for you. As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.

Investigations into reported collisions by drones with civil aircraft found that they were caused instead by birds, wires and posts, or structural failures unrelated to unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), a U.S. regulator said. There has been widespread concern about the risks that the flying of drones close to aircraft can pose, and the Federal Aviation Administration said Thursday that reports of "possible" drone sightings to FAA air traffic facilities continued to increase in fiscal year 2016. There were 1,274 such reports of drone sightings from February through September last year, compared with 874 for the same period in 2015, the FAA said in a statement. Some of these sightings could have also been of birds mistaken for drones, according to analysts. The agency added that although the data contained several reports of pilots claiming drone strikes on their aircraft, the FAA has not verified any collision between a civil aircraft and a civil drone to date.

SOUTH OF MOSUL, IRAQ – Closely supported by the U.S.-led international coalition, Iraqi forces secured a series of cautious advances on Thursday, pushing into a sprawling military base outside of Mosul and onto the grounds of the city's airport, where they took control of the runway. The three-pronged attack began just after sunrise, with three convoys of Iraqi forces snaking north across Nineveh's hilly desert on Mosul's southern approach. Iraq's special forces joined federal police and rapid response units in the push -- part of a major assault that started earlier this week to drive IS from the western half of Iraq's second-largest city. By afternoon they had entered the Ghazlani military base south of the city, as well as the airport. Iraqi helicopters circled above Mosul firing down onto the city's southwestern edge. Coalition and Iraqi airstrikes that hit targets inside Mosul sent plumes of white smoke into the air on the horizon.

U.S. Navy research teams recently completed combat trials with the branch's Tactical Battle Manager system using unmanned aerial vehicles. The Tactical Battle Manager system, or TBM, is a software platform designed to coordinate combat missions using "wingman" UAVs to assist manned and unmanned teams in combat. Researchers tested the system in a simulated beyond-visual-range combat scenario. The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory collaborated with the Naval Air Systems Command, the Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence and the Air Force Research Laboratory for the trials. During the tests, operators controlled a lead air vehicle and communicated with autonomous agents controlled by the TBM.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - AirMap, which has rocketed to become the world's top air traffic management software platform for drones, is raising $26 million in new financing from the venture arms of top tech firms ranging form Microsoft to Airbus.

MEMPHIS -- Amid the confusion and pandemonium that would follow a major earthquake, Memphis-area emergency-response officials plan to deploy drones to check for collapsed buildings and bridges, locate fires and guide rescue crews. Toward that end, the Central United States Earthquake Consortium, a Memphis-based agency charged with helping prepare an eight-state region for temblors on the New Madrid Seismic Zone, has begun developing a network of licensed drone pilots to aid in quake-response efforts. This week, CUSEC will convene an initial meeting of prospective participants. "We're going to use their insights into determining how to build this (network)," said Jim Wilkinson, executive director of CUSEC. The use of drones following disasters is not new.

A new hack has been discovered that gathers sensitive information from a desktop computer's tiny blinking LED lights. Researchers have successfully extracted a computer's secrets using a data-stealing drone that is capable of recording the Morse code-like patterns of LED indicators. However, the team has also devised a strategy to combat the hack – a security measure that takes sensitive computer systems off the internet. A new hack has been discovered that gathers sensitive information from a desktop computer's tiny blinking LED lights. Researchers at Ben-Gurion University have uncovered a new way to hack computers.