All kinds of animals, from fish to crustaceans, hang out in the depths during the day, where the darkness provides protection from predators. At night, they migrate up to the shallows to forage. Then they swim back down again when the sun rises--a great big conveyor belt of biomass. Today in the journal Science Robotics, a team of engineers and oceanographers describes how they got a new autonomous underwater vehicle to lock onto movements of organisms and follow them around the ocean's "twilight zone," a chronically understudied band between 650 feet and 3,200 feet deep, which scientists also refer to as mid-water. Thanks to some clever engineering, the researchers did so without flustering these highly sensitive animals, making Mesobot a groundbreaking new tool for oceanographers.

China is stepping-up its mass surveillance, with a flock of camera-equipped drones designed to look like doves. The surveillance drones are fitted with flapping wings, allowing them to swoop, dive and glide just like the real thing. The robotic spies are almost indistinguishable from real doves and have even been spotted flying in flocks of real birds – helping them to avoid detection from radar. The machines are fitted with all the technology of a top-end spy drone, including a high-definition camera for photographs and video clips, GPS antenna, flight control system, and satellite data link. More than 30 military and government agencies have already deployed the birdlike drones to spy on the population, sources claim.

As technology advances, making AI (artificial intelligence) and cybercrime tools such as malwarecommonplace, the future landscape of attacks is likely to involve a highly advanced merger of the two. Joon Son Chung of Oxford University, Andrew Senior, Oriol Vinyals and Andrew Zisserman of Google developed an AI-powered lip reading algorithm that is capable of deciphering nearly double the amount of words as a professional human lip reader. Google and Oxford University researchers, in their paper titled Lip Reading Sentences in the Wild, detailed how they created a lip reading neural network that actually outperformed a human professional. The researchers used Google's DeepMind neural network, training it to lip read by using thousands of hours of BBC TV videos, which showed the AI a wide variety of people speaking in different ways. Newsweek is hosting a Structure Security event Sept. 26-27 in San Francisco.