The drone technology will be replacing the jobs of inventory quality assurance employees, cutting inventory checks across massive distribution centers (the one in Bentonville is 1.2 million square feet) from one month down to a single day. When Natarajan joined Walmart in November 2014, he and his team were tasked with investigating cutting-edge technologies, asking, "How can we can converge them in ways that make sense for us?" he said. The application at the top of the list was using drone technology to improve the safety and efficiency of Walmart's 190 US distribution centers. In collaboration with the Federal Aviation Administration and NASA, Walmart is developing internally autonomous drone technology that allows a quad-copter drone, roughly 3 feet by 3 feet, to take 30 images per second from a top-mounted camera. The camera is linked to a control center and scans for tracking number matches.

The beloved trio of Top Gear presenters is long gone, but another pillar of the BBC's most popular show endures: spectacular stunts in exotic locales, with cars that drill dimples into your cheeks. That explains why even in the, let's just say mixed reviews of the new crew's first episode, no one complained about the American's star turn. In a 10-minute segment, new host Matt LeBlanc took the dirt-spitting Ariel Nomad for a run through the Moroccan desert, dodging "villains" riding motorcycles, flying drones, and doing whatever it is you do with a paramotor. The 47,000 Nomad is the off-road sibling to the bonkers Atom, so it obviously struck the Top Gear guys as something "we can have a lot of fun with," says series producer Alex Renton. He's been with the show for 11 years and got the top job for this, its 23rd season. Putting LeBlanc behind the wheel brought a dose of comedy to an already silly car and the 30-person "traveling circus" that descended on Northern Africa for three days in February.

The river Seine is the fourth-highest it's been in a century, with the water threatening to rise as high as 21 feet. The river winds through Paris, and it threatens life, limb, and history itself. Already museums are moving precious works to higher ground, and the storm causing the flooding has killed over a dozen across Europe. Here, instead, is a focus on a much smaller slice of the disaster. Château de Chambord, a country estate built for King Francis I, is partially underwater.

Amazon wowed the internet with its drone delivery project, a prototype drone that brought a small package right to a customer's door. This was the future of drones in retail, said Amazon, promising a universe where customers never had to set foot in a store. Now Wal-Mart, Amazon's erstwhile physical competitor, is getting in on the drone game, but they're not bothering with delivery at all. No, when Wal-Mart flies drones, as it plans to do in the next 6 to 9 months, it will fly them inside warehouses. To cut costs on labor, naturally.

Shipping giant Maersk Group made headlines earlier this year when it used a drone to deliver a bucket of cookies to a tanker at sea. That was just the beginning of an effort the company thinks could dramatically change its business. The company is evaluating ways to expand its use of drones and plans a bigger test later this year, said Markus Kuhn, a supply chain manager at Maersk, at the Drones Data X conference in San Francisco. In January, the company made a drone fly 250 meters from one of its barges to a tanker and drop off a batch of cookies. It's now looking for a drone-making partner for a test flight that would haul a 10-kilogram package for 10 kilometers. That test would illustrate a key use case for Maersk, that of resupplying its fleet of tankers, oil platforms, container ships and other craft.

Ribbons of tickets trade hands for a drone raffle. It's DC Drone Day on a field in the part of western Maryland where suburbs give way to parks, rolling hills and farmland. The field is a weekend hangout spot for a group called DC/RC, one of several local clubs for people who are into flying things; specifically, pilots of radio-controlled things; even more specifically, aeromodelers. Aircraft modeling is a decades-old hobby that counts tens of thousands of followers in the country and has seen its share of changes in technology. Drones arrive as the latest revolution, and aeromodelers are sizing it up with a sense of both intrigue and apprehension -- like staring down the new guy at school who's got the cool kicks and somehow, keys to all the secret parts of the building, but sometimes does incredibly stupid things that ire the gym teacher into making everyone run laps.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc (WMT.N) said Thursday it was six to nine months from beginning to use drones to check warehouse inventories in the United States, taking a step closer to using the technology to compete better with rivals. In October 2015, the world's largest retailer applied to U.S. regulators for permission to test drones for home delivery, curbside pickup and checking warehouse inventories as it planned to use drones to fill and deliver online orders. Federal regulators are still considering rules for commercial operation of drones that would be involved in package delivery - viewed as the next frontier for big retailers such as Walmart and Amazon Inc (AMZN.O). Walmart's Vice President of Last Mile and Emerging Sciences Shekar Natarajan demonstrated the use of drones to reporters in one of the company's regional distribution centers. "We are still in early phases of testing and understanding how drones can be better used in different types of business functions," he said.

Shekar Natarajan, Wal-Mart's vice president of logistics strategy, told reporters the technology is custom-built on top of the drone and is proprietary for Wal-Mart. A control tower will oversee the images on a screen and will send alerts when items are flagged so that workers can go back to the stacks to fix the issue.

The recent killing of the Taliban Chieftain, Mullah Akhtar Mansour, by a drone inside the Pakistan province of Baluchistan, is a striking reminder that we have entered a futuristic world where war is waged by flying killer robots and that we have witnessed a massive leap forward in the history of human conflict. Given that war accelerates history and the Islamic world is incapable of producing the cell phones on which its Islamists plot to kill us, the mullah's death by drone reminds us of immutable laws governing the fall of civilizations. Declining civilizations will always face superior firepower from ascending civilizations because sovereignty is only temporarily uncontested. The U.S. agency that conducts drone warfare worldwide, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), was constituted in 2002 and has grown ten-fold since its inception. Staffed by both the CIA and military, it now operates in super-secret locations across the globe. For the first ten years of its existence, JSOC conducted operations which were largely under reported and therefore garnered very little public scrutiny.

An anti-drone system developed by a trio of UK companies is to receive its first public test by America's Federal Aviation Authority (FAA), in an effort to protect airports from the risks of hobbyist's unmanned aerial vehicles. The system, called the Anti-UAV Defence System (Auds), looks like a mounted turret but instead of shooting drones out of the sky with bullets, it fires nothing more menacing than radio waves. Auds has three barrels of descending sizes, which act as a set of directional radio antennas. The portion of the radio spectrum used by drones is narrow, and so a short, loud (in electromagnetic terms) blast of energy is enough to completely prevent the drone from being able to communicate with its controller. Conventional multidirectional jamming systems work on drones, but have the downside of preventing the use of anything else in the area that relies on the same portion of the radio spectrum, such as mobile phones.