Nevada is one of the states leading America into a drone-filled future. With special FAA permissions and a permissive testing environment, it makes sense that companies looking to test drone delivery would start there. And what better way to show off drone in the Nevada desert than by flying a nice, tall, sugary, 7-Eleven Slurpee out to a home in Reno? That's exactly what drone delivery startup Flirtey did. An obvious collaboration with 7-Eleven, the presumably Slurpee-containing box is decked out in both company's logos.

WASHINGTON – With a chicken sandwich, hot coffee and donuts, aviation history was made Friday. These were among the items in the first drone delivery on U.S. soil approved by aviation officials, made by convenience retailer 7-Eleven and the drone startup Flirtey. The delivery took place in Reno, Nevada, with the items loaded into a special box for hot and cold food and flown to a local family. "We're absolutely thrilled to have 7-Eleven, the largest convenience chain in the world, embracing new technologies and working with us at Flirtey to make drone delivery a reality for customers all over the world," said Flirtey Chief Executive Matt Sweeny. "This is just the first step in our collaboration with 7-Eleven. Flirtey's historic drone deliveries to date have been stepping stones to store-to-home drone delivery, and today is a giant leap toward a not-too-distant future where we are delivering you convenience on demand."

A 7-Eleven customer's order for Slurpees, a chicken sandwich, donuts, hot coffee, and candy will forever go down in history. What makes it remarkable is that the convenience store chain used a drone to deliver the order to a family in Reno, Nev., 7-Eleven said on Friday. The company partnered with drone startup Flirtey for the delivery, which the companies said was the first time a drone has legally delivered a package to a U.S. resident who placed an order from a retailer. "This delivery required special flight planning, risk analysis, and detailed flight procedures ensuring residential safety and privacy were equally integrated," Chris Walach, the director of operations for the Nevada Institute for Autonomous Systems (NIAS), said in a statement. The NIAS is a Nevada government-backed non-profit autonomous vehicle advocacy group that helped oversee the delivery.

Kelly was caught on April 25th with a drone spray-painted black. Tape had also been placed over the lights, presumably to avoid detection during the illegal flights. "Kelly's offending was serious," Detective Constable Mark Silk, who served as investigating officer, said. "Psychoactive substances and tobacco have an inflated value in prison and this can lead to offences being committed within. Kelly's sentencing is the first of its kind in the UK.

In today's fast growing drone market, sensor technologies are often the unheralded secret sauce inside. In this article, we discuss some of the types of sensor technologies that power today's drones. Figure 1: Various sensor technologies are used in a variety of ways in modern drones. Accelerometers are used to determine position and orientation of the drone in flight. Like your Nintendo Wii controller or your iPhone screen position, these small silicon-based sensors play a key role in maintaining flight control. MEMS accelerometers sense movement in several ways.

Amazon's Prime Air drone delivery service, if it ever gets off the ground, could one day use the top of street lights, cell towers, and even church steeples as docking stations for its flying machine. The stations would serve as charging points for the drones, enabling them to stop off at multiple points for a battery boost thereby giving them a much greater flying range. Such a system could, in theory, open up pretty much the whole of the country to the possibility of drone delivery, as a single drone could hop from point to point on its way to an address. The docking stations could also shelter the drones from harsh weather conditions that may develop after they leave the distribution center to begin their delivery run. The new ideas are outlined in a patent awarded this month by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) under the title, "Multi-use UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) docking station systems and methods."

"The drone was given to me as a graduation gift from my parents for making honor roll," Harris told ABC News. Although it took a minute to get it airborne, Harris says he flew the Phantom up to 50 mph, floating around 20 feet above the speeding thieves. He was apparently able to keep up long enough to get a great shot of the thieves from above, before he eventually lost track of them. Even so, the footage was enough for the local authorities to make an educated guess as to where the thieves were headed. According to the local Sheriff's Department, the cops were waiting for the boat thieves when they arrived at their destination.

But experts aren't so sure Facebook's approach is correct. One of the ideas behind Internet.org is to provide a considerably slimmed down version of the internet called "Free Basics," which allows people to access "news, employment, health, education and local information." By offering a customized internet, Facebook flouts the tenets of net neutrality, some warn. Millions of people worldwide have no way to access the internet, and it is an urgent problem to solve in the near future. That portion will be decided between those large corporations that are part of Internet.org.

Internet access many be taken for granted by many, but some 4 billion people around the world are still missing out with an estimated 1.6 billion of those living in remote areas with no mobile network coverage. Facebook plans to tackle the problem with a range of technologies including its high-altitude solar plane Aquila, which has just completed its first successful test flight. The flight, which has just been confirmed by Facebook, took place on 28 June at Yuma Proving Ground (YPG) in Yuma, Arizona. Internet access many be taken for granted by many, but some 4 billion people around the world are still missing. The solar-powered aircraft is designed to beam internet access to hundreds of millions of people in hard-to-reach areas around the globe.

As the sun rose over the Sonora Desert in late June, Mark Zuckerberg stood beside a runway not far from the Mexican border. Next to him stood Facebook vice president of engineering Jay Parikh and a few other colleagues, all eyes on the strip of asphalt that stretched toward the horizon. They had arrived a little before dawn, and they were the latecomers. A team of Facebook technicians began prepping the launch at midnight the day before. Among them was Martin Gomez, who sat inside a trailer at the other end of this Army airfield near Yuma, Arizona, taking the crew through its "go"-"no go" checklist.