I never understood the fascination with drones--until I received my first one over the holidays. It was a small green quadcopter that looked more like a toy you'd pull out of a McDonald's Happy Meal. I wasn't too excited, but the second I turned it on, I was hooked. If you didn't get a drone for the holidays, buy one for yourself. This Metakoo Bee Mini Quadcopter is on sale for $28.

When it comes to defending against pesky drones, the French military has gone to the birds. These drone-hunting birds of prey are being trained at a French Air Force base in Southwestern France. They're literally born on top of drones, and kept there during early stages of feeding. When they're ready to fly, they're brought to a field to intercept drones. In turn, they're rewarded with meat.

Want to use artificial intelligence (AI) to train autonomous drones and self-driving cars the way Microsoft does? Microsoft recently shared its open source system for performing such trainings, including its AI-based platform AirSim. The project, called the Aerial Informatics and Robotics Platform, aims to provide simulation tools and resources to help in the training of robots, drones, and other hardware that can operate autonomously, according to a Microsoft blog post. By improving the way that these devices and vehicles can navigate their environment, the hope is that that can eventually shed their "emerging technology" title. By using virtual simulators, like AirSim, a team is able to collect valuable data and train the systems more efficiently before they take them out of the lab.

Last winter, as meteorologists warned of a monster El Niño, researchers at the Nature Conservancy in California prepared to mobilize. El Niño promised to bring in king tides that would raise the sea level by as much as one foot above normal during high tide, causing flooding along the coastline that researchers could study as a preview of climate change-induced sea level rise. But when a king tide arrives, it floods lots of pockets along the coastline at once. So they decided to try a new, distributed surveillance strategy: commercial drones, co-opted from a gung-ho statewide network of citizen scientists. The plan had a lot of advantages.

A couple in the US has been charged with voyeurism by electronic equipment, having been caught using a drone to spy on neighbours. One victim claims to have chased the drone in his truck after spotting it outside his window, seizing it when it landed in a car park and handing it over to police in December. "The citizen who located the drone was familiar with drones and had a similar one himself," reads a search warrant unsealed this week in court, according to Deseret News. "There [were] multiple videos recording individuals inside their residences through windows. Some of the recordings were multiple stories high in apartment complexes."

Intel has made a name for itself in PCs and servers but is now dabbling in a new product category with its first-ever quadcopter now on sale. The chipmaker's US$1,099 Aero Ready to Fly Drone comes fully assembled, with an integrated flight controller. It also comes with a remote control receiver and transmitter. The drone has cool features like auto-pilot, with the ability to self-navigate by coordinating GPS and recognizing surroundings to avoid collisions. It has a 3D RealSense depth camera that can recognize objects and take rough measurements.

Made by the dronemaker Beijing Yi-Hang Creation Science and Technology Corporation, the Ehang 184 is a "passenger drone" that can carry a single person (and luggage) of up to 220 pounds. With a four-rotor layout in the form of a giant quadcopter, it has enough battery power to fly a range of just over 30 miles, at speeds up to 100 miles per hour. The Ehang 184 is also highly autonomous; while its flight computer is linked to a command center (with some human oversight), the flight computer is capable of making emergency landings, self diagnosing issues, and avoiding obstacles.

On Jan. 20, the drone war entered its third Administration. Over the inaugural weekend, American drones fired missiles at suspected Al Qaeda fighters in Yemen, killing five people. The drone war, that is, the popular, unmanned-vehicle term for America's strategy of targeted killing, is an outgrowth of President George W. Bush's war on terror, a vestigial organ that became the centerpiece for the Obama administration's eight years of low-intensity warfare. With much of American national security strategy poised to change under the new Trump administration, it's worth taking a step back to examine what, exactly, the United States hoped to do with its drones. The United States is, it's worth noting, at war.

Snowboarders are pulled by a drone on a lake near Cesis, Latvia, in January. Snowboarders are pulled by a drone on a lake near Cesis, Latvia, in January. You may have heard of drone racing, but people keep coming up with new ways to enjoy these flying machines. One of the latest twists on drone sports comes from Latvia. A company called Aerones has developed a drone to use for droneboarding, a new sport that's just what it sounds like -- a snowboarder being pulled through the snow by a powerful drone.

Today on In Case You Missed It: Why get stuck in traffic when you can simply fly over it? The UAE's largest city announced its intent to unleash swarms of EHang 184 "Personal Flying Vehicles" -- the same ones that wowed crowds at last year's CES show -- to ferry citizens around town starting as early as this July. We also take a look at Microsoft's new open-source UAV simulator, the Aerial Informatics and Robotics Platform. With it, drone designers will be able to program and test their flying creations for autonomous operation without having to worry about their precious prototypes crashing and burning. Or getting attacked by wildlife.