Avatar: The Way of Water is a 192-minute film about a family of blue aliens who enjoy riding dragons and are taught to ride fish and befriend whale aliens--whaliens, if you will--by another tribe of aliens, who are teal. Together, they must resist the nature-hating marines who ride around in robots and, in a shocking betrayal of the correct order of things, have cloned a squadron of themselves into blue alien bodies. The film's director, James Cameron, has shot the whole thing in 3D, and much of it, especially the action scenes, is also displayed at a special high frame rate, which looks like Cameron has personally switched on an obscure setting in your brain. To see a James Cameron movie is to remember that in rare cases it does not matter whether a film is good so long as the film is fucking awesome, and those are the cases on which Cameron has built his filmography. That some of his movies are also good--the Terminator films, Aliens, The Abyss--is more a matter of coincidence.

Generally, the term "aerial robot" is synonymous with "drone," but there are lots of other ways for robots to avoid spending time on the ground. One of the most creative that we've seen recently comes from Georgia Tech Professor Jonathan Rogers, who has been working on a sloth-inspired aerial robot named Tarzan. The machine is designed to swing around on overhead wires strung above fields to monitor growing crops. And one day, it may swing around electrical wires in cities, too. Tarzan is built with carbon fiber arms, reinforced with aluminum.

A robot designed to swing between cables suspended over crop rows to monitor plants has been developed by US university Georgia Tech. The prototype robot, called Tarzan, will gather information about the plants and send it to the farmer. The team plan to test Tarzan on a soybean farm later this year and believe it will be ready for release in three years.

Team leader and Georgia Institute of Technology professor Jonathan Rogers said they're trying to design Tarzan to become very energy efficient, just like real sloths. The researchers are doing that to be able to create solar-powered versions one day, so farms can have a few of these machines always swinging around when they're needed. There won't be any need to recharge or refuel them anymore. While it may take some time to achieve that goal, the researchers plan to start testing the robot soon. This summer, it's going to a soybean field in Athens, Georgia to take photos for another team of scientists studying different varieties of the plant.

Some farmers already use drones to monitor their crops, but a team of researchers from Georgia Tech have created a far more interesting alternative. Instead of designing yet another drone, they created a robot inspired by Kristen Bell's favorite animal: the sloth. However, they named it "Tarzan" after the most recognizable character who moves by swinging from vine to vine. You see, their machine was designed to move like the fictional jungle dweller. Tarzan will be able to swing over crops using its 3D-printed claws and parallel guy-wires stretched over fields.

NEWS ANALYSIS: The sadly embarrassing end to Microsoft's public experiment with a chatbot that would mirror millennial attitudes provides some critical lessons about designing machine learning systems. Imagine if you will that Edgar Rice Burroughs had taught his famous character Tarzan how to type and then dropped him into a room with nothing but a computer attached to Twitter. That computer would be the young Tarzan's only window to the outside world. You'll remember that Burroughs' fictional Tarzan (the character in the book, not the movie Tarzan who yodeled among jungle greenery) was a very fast learner who had limited context with which to judge humanity. If you think of Microsoft's Tay machine learning project as being roughly equivalent to Tarzan, it makes it easier to understand what happened when Microsoft had to take its teenaged chatbot off the Internet after the Web's creepier denizen's taught it to spew anti-Semitic rants.