Neuralink is reportedly being investigated by the US government for possibly mistreating animals in lab experiments as the company rushes to build an implantable brain chip. The startup, founded in 2016 by belligerent biz baron Elon Musk, is developing a medical device to help people afflicted with brain disorders to communicate, see, or move more easily. The Tesla tycoon said he wants to see the chips in humans next year. However, before Neuralink obtains permission to start conducting trials on humans from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), it has to test the technology on animals to show it's safe enough for people to try. A lawsuit, filed in February by animal rights group the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, accused the startup of killing monkeys after a series of sloppy surgical procedures to insert electrodes inside their skulls.

Recognizing people by their faces in pictures and video feeds is seen everywhere starting from social media to phone cameras. A face recognition system is built for matching human faces with a digital image. Ultimately what a computer recognizes is pixel values ranging from 0-255. In Computer Vision face recognition has been in since ages and has evolved over the years. Many researchers have come up with many new techniques to efficiently identify and tell apart faces.

Remember back when you could fly drones without having to pay the government money first, and when the only thing you had to worry about was a midair takedown by an anti-drone hit squad made up of highly-trained Dutch eagles? We're sad to have to report that we probably won't be seeing compelling videos of eagles handling rogue drones anymore, and also that the United States government has flexed its muscles and mandatory drone registration is now back on. You probably remember how the FAA finalized its mandatory drone registration rules just in time for the holiday season in 2015. Any drone that weighed more than 0.55 pounds was required to be registered before being flown outdoors, a process that involved providing your complete name, physical address, mailing address, email address, and a credit card that was charged a one-time fee of US $5. In exchange, you got a unique registration number that had to be visible on all of your drones.

Designing specialized processing chips for artificial intelligence is becoming common for serious tech companies, and Tesla, it seems, is no exception. According to reports from both The Register and CNBC, CEO Elon Musk was talking up the company's custom AI chips at machine learning conference NIPS last night, telling attendees that Tesla is "developing specialized AI hardware that we think will be the best in the world." "I wanted to make it clear that Tesla is serious about AI, both on the software and hardware fronts," said Musk, according to The Register. "We are developing custom AI hardware chips". We'd heard rumors about Tesla building its own AI chips before, with a CNBC report in September claiming that the company had more than 50 people working on the project.

Regulators hope that this will lead to fewer drones flying over airports and otherwise causing havoc in British skies. A drone weighing around 400 g (0.88lbs) can crack the windscreen of a helicopter, while all but the heaviest drones will have trouble cracking the windscreen of an airliner (and then only at speeds you'd expect beyond the airport). While you might not cause as much chaos as some have feared, you could still create a disaster using a compact drone. It's nothing new to register drones, of course, and it doesn't appear to have dampened enthusiasm in the US.

The US recently flip-flopped on whether people have to register their non-commercial unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with the FAA at all, while China made it mandatory to register drones heavier than 0.55 pounds. The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) is working with member states and the industry to come up with safety rules that are as all-encompassing as possible, and will include the EU's basic aviation safety regulations. The European Commission will also finance the integration of drones into the existing aviation system, while a group of experts will be assembled to weigh in on future policy recommendations. The Commission proposes to have the systems for registering drones and drone operators, e-identification and geo-fencing up by 2019.