From the Sojourner rover, which landed on Mars in 1997, to Perseverance, which touched down in February, the robots of the Red Planet share a defining feature: wheels. Rolling is far more stable and energy efficient than walking, which even robots on Earth still struggle to master. After all, NASA would hate for its very expensive Martian explorer to topple over and flail around like a turtle on its back. The problem with wheels, though, is that they limit where rovers can go: To explore complicated Martian terra like steep hills, you need the kinds of legs that evolution gave animals on Earth. So a team of scientists from ETH Zurich in Switzerland and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany have been playing around with a small quadrupedal robot called SpaceBok, designed to mimic an antelope known as a springbok.

In a February 19 speech at the Munich Security Conference, delivered virtually from the White House, President Joe Biden declared, "We must shape the rules that will govern the advance of technologies and the norms of behavior in cyberspace, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, so they are used to lift people up, not used to pin them down." A few weeks earlier, during an address at the State Department's Truman Building, the president said, "Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy." The Trump administration's undermining of years of work on internet diplomacy makes technology an ever more vital (and challenging) element of renewed US engagement abroad. Digital issues are no longer extricable from "traditional" foreign policy issues across trade, human rights, and security. And as the new White House starts to navigate these waters, one idea in particular has become a sort of bumper sticker for an overarching strategy: Unite democracies on technology. As the Chinese and Russian governments become more technologically assertive and undermine human rights, and as democracies grapple with how to appropriately implement rules and regulations for the likes of artificial intelligence systems, this work is essential.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has resigned. His successor will have to manage a myriad of troubles for the company. "The thing that made him and the company successful is now causing havoc," Brad Stone, author of The Upstarts, which chronicles category-altering companies such as Uber and Airbnb, says of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. SAN FRANCISCO -- Want to run Uber? You'd better have a steel constitution for cleaning up cultural rot and the insight to make the leaky business profitable.