Kidneys were flown a record 10 miles across the Nevada desert by drone earlier this month, setting a record for unmanned aerial organ delivery. It comes after the first-ever successful drone delivery of an organ was completed last year, when a 44-year-old's new kidney over two miles in an unmanned drone from the Living Legacy Foundation organ distribution center to the University of Maryland Medical Center (both in Baltimore) on April 19. The latest drone organ delivery - completed by a MissionGo device - surpasses that historic flight by traveling five-times further. It was the second of two human tissue drone flights completed the same day, September 17. MissionGO and the Nevada Donor Network flew corneas two miles by drone, from one hospital to another, then flew research kidneys 10 miles from a remote airport to a town in the middle of the state's desert.

Microsoft researchers have created a system that uses artificial intelligence to keep a type of glider known as a sailplane in the air without using a motor, by autonomously finding and catching rides on naturally occurring thermals, similar to how many birds stay aloft. "Birds do this seamlessly, and all they're doing is harnessing nature. And they do it with a peanut-sized brain," says Ashish Kapoor, a principal researcher at Microsoft. For a machine to do it requires a complex set of AI algorithms that can identify things like air temperature, wind direction and areas where it is not allowed to fly. Then, the system must use other AI methods to take that information and make real-time predictions about where it might find its next ride on a thermal.