It looks like a cross between a toy airplane and a drone, but this British solar-powered aircraft could be the future of aerial surveillance. PHASA-35, built by British company BAE Systems, is a 150kg solar-electric aircraft that can quietly cruise through the stratosphere for months at a time. Named after its 35-metre wingspan, the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) travels at a maximum height of 70,000 feet, at a leisurely speed of 55mph. Designed as a cheaper and lighter alternative to satellites, it can be used for Earth observation and surveillance, border control, communications and disaster relief. Now, BAE Systems reveals that PHASA-35 has just completed a second round of test flights into the stratosphere – the second layer of Earth's atmosphere.

Xreal, formerly Nreal, hosted one of the busiest booths at CES in recent years, so it's no surprise that the company is back with new AR glasses for this year's show -- especially given the much anticipated launch of Apple's Vision Pro. Following the Nreal Light from 2019, the brand new Xreal Air 2 Ultra finally brings back 6DoF (six degrees of freedom) spatial tracking and hand tracking, along with a wider 52-degree FOV (field of view) and a 42-pixel-per-degree sharpness within an 80-gram titanium package. The firm goes as far as claiming that these specs make the 699 Air 2 Ultra a compelling alternative to the 3,499 Vision Pro. Unlike the standalone mixed reality headsets, the Air 2 series of glasses need to be powered by an external computing unit, such as a smartphone, a computer or Xreal's Beam module, via USB-C. While the earlier Air 2 Pro and Air 2 were positioned more as personal display wearables, the Air 2 Ultra emphasizes on its 6DoF spatial computing capabilities, meaning virtual objects can be mapped to the real world while you walk around.

Between video calls and workouts at home, it felt like I was constantly putting some sort of implement in my ear. Wireless earbuds have become essential--as has noise-canceling technology to drown out the sounds of housemates. If you're looking for a new pair, and are leery of dropping $249 on Apple's shiny Pro'pods, consider Amazon's recent update to its Bluetooth buds. The second-generation Echo Buds have active noise cancellation and built-in, hands-free Alexa. The price--$120, or $140 with a wireless charging case--is why these headphones are worth your attention.

Robots excel at predictable, repetitive tasks, and what could be more predictable and repetitive than death? In Japan, a plastic moulding company called Nissei Eco (which also does funeral arrangements, I guess) is planning to introduce SoftBank's Pepper robot as a cheaper substitute for human priests reading sutras at Buddhist funerals. The average cost of a funeral in Japan is somewhere between two and three million yen, as of the most recent study of the industry, which is nearly a decade old. That works out to between US $25,000 and $30,000, which is twice or even three times as expensive as the average funeral in the United States. Like most things, much of the cost is related to the fact that there are humans involved who you have to pay to be there because they'd almost certainly rather be somewhere else.

Machine learning is the new game changer in business technology. In a world where digital information volumes are doubling every two years on average, machine learning allows organizations to extract highly valuable information from enormous data stores at heretofore unimaginable speeds. Alternatively, companies can invest in none of the above and turn to one of the many new machine learning as-a-service solutions. Getting started with machine learning in this way basically requires what virtually every organization is awash in today: data. The "machine" in question here is a computer.