Meet LEO: a robot that can walk on two legs, fly, hop, skateboard, and even slackline. This mix between a drone and a traditional robot was developed by a team at Caltech's Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies, and its creators claim that LEO is the first robot with both multi-joint legs and propeller-based thrusters--which helps it fly and allows it to achieve a high degree of balance control. They further detailed LEO's range of capabilities and potentials in a new paper published this week in Science Robotics. Caltech engineers modeled the design for LEO, which is short for LEONARDO (LEgs ONboARD drOne), after birds, which can move about and maneuver through a variety of environments with relative ease. "Think about the way birds are able to flap and hop to navigate telephone lines," Soon-Jo Chung, the corresponding author on the paper and a professor at Caltech, said in a press release. "A complex yet intriguing behavior happens as birds move between walking and flying."

China has just taken a giant step forward in its ambitions to control everything that is done on the Internet, with the launch of a new "rights in cyberspace" law. It can sometimes seem that the Internet is a "lawless place", where anyone can do whatever they want; in reality, our actions on the Internet have more and more consequences, and the best example of this is China. The communist government has not hidden its interest in implementing more controls on the Internet, with the aim of "guaranteeing the rights and interests" of its citizens; however, along the way it is taking decisions that may violate others, such as privacy. The latest law, which came into force on December 1, is perhaps the most controversial. It implies the obligation to implement facial recognition to hire phone lines or mobile Internet, for all new registrations.