Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. A missing hiker's dead body was finally found in July in Italy's rugged Piedmont region after 10 months. The recovery team credited the breakthrough to an AI-powered drone that spotted a critical clue within hours. The same process would have taken weeks or even months if done by the human eye.

How long does it take to identify the helmet of a hiker lost in a 183-hectare mountain area, analyzing 2,600 frames taken by a drone from approximately 50 meters away? If done with a human eye, weeks or months. If analyzed by an artificial intelligence system, one afternoon. The National Alpine and Speleological Rescue Corps, known by it's Italian initialism CNSAS, relied on AI to find the body of a person missing in Italy's Piedmont region on the north face of Monviso--the highest peak in the Cottian Alps--since September 2024. According to Saverio Isola, the CNSAS drone pilot who intervened along with his colleague Giorgio Viana, the operation--including searching for any sign of the missing hiker, the discovery and recovery of his body, and a stoppage due to bad weather--lasted less than three days.

It's 4 p.m. in Joshua Tree National Park and the air temperature is hovering around 99 degrees -- relatively mild for an August afternoon. But at ground level, the sand along the popular Hidden Valley Nature Trail has reached a scorching 136. "I don't want my bare feet on that," says ranger Anna Marini as she shows her thermometer gun reading to a couple visiting from Switzerland, who are appropriately awed. Marini uses the tool as a prop to engage hikers traversing this surreal desert wilderness that's roughly the size of Rhode Island. As the coordinator of the park's Preventative Search and Rescue Program, her mission is to protect visitors from hazards that include extreme heat, razor-sharp cacti and thirsty bees.

Ewers grew up skiing and hiking in the Highlands, giving him a clear idea of the complicated challenges involved in rescue operations there. "There wasn't much to do growing up, other than spending time outdoors or sitting in front of my computer," he says. "I ended up doing a lot of both." To start, Ewers took datasets of search and rescue cases from around the world, which include details such as an individual's age, whether they were hunting, horseback riding or hiking, and if they suffered from dementia, along with information about the location the person was eventually found--by water, buildings, open ground, trees, or roads. He trained an AI model with this data, in addition to geographical data from Scotland.

For a moment, I fell under the spell of Bryan Johnson. Bathed in early-morning sunlight, the 46-year-old L.A.-based tech centimillionaire and longevity celebrity didn't look much younger than his age, although he claims to have the wrinkles of a 10-year-old and organs that are several years younger than his lifespan. We were standing at the Temescal Canyon trailhead in Pacific Palisades on Jan. 13, ahead of a Johnson-sponsored "Don't Die" hike, one of many organized across the world that day and the only one hosted by him. Of the 500-plus people who had RSVP'd for the L.A. event, about 200 showed up. Some had slept in their cars to make it.

New software is based on deep learning model and can analyse pictures of countryside taken by drones for human-like objects, department says.

New software is based on deep learning model and can analyse pictures of countryside taken by drones for human-like objects, department says.

A couple of decades ago, on a backpacking trip in the Sierra Nevada, I was marching up a mountain solo under the influence of LSD. Halfway to the top, I took a break near a scrubby tree pushing up through the rocky soil. Gulping water and catching my breath, I admired both its beauty and its resilience. Its twisty, weathered branches had endured by wresting moisture and nutrients from seemingly unwelcoming terrain, solving a puzzle beyond my reckoning. I sensed a kind of wisdom in its conservation of resources.

NASA's next generation lunar backpack could give astronauts the ability to create a 3D map of the surface of the moon, as they walk across the regolith. The Kinematic Navigation and Cartography Knapsack (KNaCK) is a mobile lidar scanner, worn as a backpack that uses light and lasers to measure range. NASA researchers and industry partners developed the device that can not only aid astronauts in the airless wastelands of the Lunar South Pole, but also on the Earth. One suggested use is for a mountaineering expedition in an unchartered environment. The hikers can create a real-time map for others in the party, as well as other hikers that might come after them - all from a simple backpack.

It is a widely known fact in the tech world that drones are flown at high altitudes, and they cannot yet fly autonomously in complex environments, like dense forests. However, thanks to latest advancements in artificial intelligence and computer vision, today drones can maneuver indoors, around difficult to reach nooks, bends and even dense forests too. Well, recently drones again hit the headlines, owing to their new ability to help people, hikers lost in woods. In their paper published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, researchers, David Schedl, Indrajit Kurmi and Oliver Bimber, from Johannes Kepler University, share how artificial intelligence to improve thermal imaging camera searches for people lost in woods. When hikers, trekkers or commoners are lost in woods, rescue team rely on binoculars, and thermal imagers installed on camera and in chopper sensors, to find the missing.