Some eagles could soon be spending much of their life in jail if the U.K. government gets its way. No, the powers-that-be aren't looking to target the majestic creature in some kind of bizarre police crackdown on bird-instigated crime. Instead, it's hoping to make use of their supreme hunting skills in its fight to keep drone-delivered contraband out of the nation's prisons. Discussing the issue during a debate in the British parliament this week, prisons minister Sam Gyimah described the threat posed by drones as "a game changer," adding that the government was looking for an effective solution for dealing with rogue unmanned flying machines around prisons and other sensitive locations. Gyimah said his team was "keeping a close eye on what's happening in Holland, where they're using eagles to stop drones." Police in the Netherlands recently completed extensive trials using highly trained eagles to snatch remotely controlled multi-rotor copters out of the sky and return them to their handler.

The Pentagon says a U.S. airstrike in Syria this month killed what the Defense Department describes as a senior Al Qaeda leader who once had ties to Usama bin Laden. Jeff Davis, identified the target as Haydar Kirkan. The spokesman says Kirkan oversaw the planning of attacks against Western targets outside of Syria, including in Turkey. Brett McGurk, the president's special envoy in the fight against the Islamic State terror group, called Haydar a "legacy Al Qaeda terrorist and external plotter," in a tweet. Davis said a U.S. drone carried out the airstrike Oct. 17 in the vicinity of Idlib, in western Syria.

Nightingale Security is a San Francisco based company that specializes in the use of drones for facility surveillance. The drones are fully autonomous, with a 4 km operational radius, and are capable of carrying a number of sensors including infrared, thermal, and hazmat. Nightingale Security offers the drones as a monthly or annual service, including installation and maintenance of all hardware and software.

Announced within a week of each other, the GoPro Karma and the DJI Mavic Pro are the season's (the year's?) hottest drones. They both fold up, they both shoot stabilized 4K video, and they'll both scare the hell out of your cat. Both have things that are absolutely fantastic, and both have things that are completely infuriating. If I had to recommend one it would be the GoPro Karma, but certainly not without reservations. The Mavic is wonderfully tiny--small enough to literally sit on the palm of your hand.

Three years ago, Jeff Bezos announced that drones are eventually going to deliver Amazon orders. In the past year, he brought out Amazon's Alexa artificial intelligence service, which understands speech well enough that you can say, "Alexa, I really need a waffle cone maker," and she'll put one in your Amazon online shopping cart, even though nobody needs a waffle cone maker. Both of these technologies--drones and cloud AI--are exciting today, yet still wobbly works in progress. But in coming years, Amazon or some other company is going to put them together. And that, finally, will evolve into a technology that could become as significant to humans as domesticated dogs.

Flexible, thin-film solar panels from a Silicon Valley company are allowing drone makers to keep their craft in the sky for hours longer than is possible with batteries alone. The panels, from Alta Devices in Sunnyvale, are produced on thin plastic sheets that can be stuck on the top frame of drones like the Bramor ppX, developed by Slovenia's C-Astral Aerospace. On Tuesday, the two companies showed off a version of the drone with six solar panels affixed to its top. The basic drone can stay aloft for 3.5 hours, but the addition of the solar panels has extended this by two hours, they said. The two plan to offer a solar version of the drone commercially.

A self-locking mailbox could someday flag down delivery drones and intelligently screen your driveway for intruders. Columbus State University computer scientist Lydia Ray presented the technology, called the ADDSMART project, during a 20 October session at the annual IEEE Ubiquitous Computing, Electronics, and Mobile Communication Conference in New York City. The project aims to achieve two goals: clearly marking addresses for autonomous vehicles, and reducing the energy and data storage costs of home surveillance systems. An early prototype mailbox attachment suggests that the trick, in both cases, may be radio-frequency identification. Powered by an Arduino Yun processor, one component of the ADDSMART device controls a high-frequency 13.56-MHz RFID reader, USB camera, passive-infrared motion sensor, solenoid lock, and an onboard Wi-Fi module.

A young elephant was saved from drowning in a manmade structure in a Zimbabwe national park by a team that is using drones to deter poaching. An anti-poaching team saved a young elephant from drowning this month, and it was caught on video. The rescue was made by the Air Shepherd team in Zimbabwe's vast Hwange National Park. Air Shepherd is a partnership between the Lindbergh Foundation and the company UAV and Drone Solutions, which is working to deter poachers in Hwange and other parks around Africa. During an early morning scouting mission, Air Shepherd drone pilots Tom Lautenbach and Gift Kgadima were driving in Hwange, getting a feel for the land that they have been flying their drones over for the past few weeks.

Roboticists are putting a tremendous amount of time and effort into finding the right combination of sensors and algorithms that will keep their drones from smashing into things. It's a very difficult problem: With a few exceptions, you've got small platforms that move fast and don't have the payload capability for the kind of sensors or computers that you really need to do real-time avoidance of things like trees or powerlines. And without obstacle avoidance, how will we ever have drones that can deliver new athletic socks to our doorstep in 30 minutes or less? At the University of Pennsylvania's GRASP Lab, where they've been working very very hard at getting quadrotors to fly through windows without running into them, Yash Mulgaonkar, Luis Guerrero-Bonilla, Anurag Makineni, and Professor Vijay Kumar have come up with what seems to be a much simpler solution for navigation and obstacle avoidance with swarms of small aerial robots: Give them a roll cage, and just let them run into whatever is in their way. This kind of "it'll be fine" philosophy is what you find in most small flying insects, like bees: They don't worry all that much about bumbling into stuff, or each other, they just kind of shrug it off and keep on going.

With backing from big broadcasters like ESPN and Sky Sports, drone racing is already making its mark on TV. The Drone Racing League's (DRL) inaugural five race season is now two races deep, having visited Miami and Los Angeles, but the company is already thinking ahead to next year's championship. After revealing that the UK would host its first professional drone race in 2017 back in September, the DRL today confirmed that the winner-takes-all season finale will be hosted at London's iconic Alexandra Palace on June 13th. Professional drone racing, if you're not aware, sees pilots compete in four "level" events that they hope will earn them enough points to qualify for the World Championship. Each racer is given a selection of custom-designed drones, which are crafted by DRL to ensure races focus on skill and not construction smarts, which beam back a first-person live feed to a VR-style headset.