They are not just cute and stripy, but devastatingly efficient when it comes to locating the best pollen-rich flowers. As a result, the humble bee is at the centre of a £4.8 million project to create drones and driverless cars. In a unusual experiment, scientists painstakingly stuck tiny radar transponders to hundreds of bumblebees and honey bees, to track them as they flew. Bees are famous in the animal world for their intelligence, even directing each other to delicious flowers using a'waggle dance'. To harness their navigational skills, researchers used radar to track bees' precise flight path as they buzzed over farmland in Hertfordshire Carefully avoiding painful stings, the researchers have also put bees in virtual reality chambers, then watched how their brains works as they navigate.

It's not only drones and driverless cars that may become the norm someday -- ocean-faring ships might also run without captains or crews. The Pentagon on Monday showed off the world's largest unmanned surface vessel, a self-driving 132-foot ship able to travel up to 10,000 nautical miles on its own to hunt for stealthy submarines and underwater mines. The military's research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, in conjunction with the Navy will be testing the ship off the San Diego coast over the next two years to observe how it interacts with other vessels and avoids collisions. Unlike smaller, remote-controlled craft launched from ships, the so-called "Sea Hunter" is built to operate on its own. "It's not a joy-stick ship," said DARPA spokesman Jared B. Adams, standing in front of the sleek, futuristic-looking steel-gray vessel docked at a maritime terminal in the heart of San Diego's shipbuilding district, where TV crews filmed the robotic craft.