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Every day, the world seems to be slipping further and further into dystopia, with President Donald Trump placing tariffs on islands inhabited by penguins and the country's head of Medicare and Medicaid touting AI-first healthcare. In case you needed an even higher dose of Orwellian anxiety in your life, though, Black Mirror has finally returned for season 7 with six brand new episodes. In its new season, the anthology series about our, shall we say, complicated relationship with technology takes on AI sentience, subscription pricing models, lost loves, high school grudges, and the privatization of health care. It's also got plenty of action, romance, and a heaping helping of tech-era terror. As with any anthology series, Black Mirror has plenty of hits, and also its share of misses, and season 7 is no exception, which only makes it more perfect for ranking.

As with seemingly everything in the UK, it all comes back to the class system. Verity Amersham, a scholarship student at Miss Mulligatawney's School for Promising Girls, is accused of pushing the hockey captain out of a window, and the school's fearsome headmistress is determined to expel her despite the flimsiest evidence. When Verity protests her innocence, Miss Mulligatawney remains unpersuaded, spelling out her reasoning in plain terms: as a northerner with working-class parents, Verity simply isn't the "right sort". The injustice of it all is a potent driver, ensuring I set about my goal of preventing Verity's expulsion with determined zeal, much like Matilda defying the hateful Miss Trunchbull. As in developer Inkle's 2021 game Overboard!, you're given a time limit to work within and a handful of areas to move between, from the library to the sick room (AKA the "san", where the school's grumpy matron lurks). Each area has characters to talk to and objects to find, and each action moves the clock forward.

Verity Studios AG, a pioneer in autonomous drones, has launched an integration program for their Failsafe technology for quadcopters. The patented Failsafe solution provides powerful and cost-effective safety enhancements to any consumer and commercial quadcopter drone platform. This program allows drone manufacturers to easily implement the Failsafe algorithm into their drones as a standalone or complementary safety solution to guard against the most common cause of system-error crashes: propulsion system failures. Failsafe enables a future of safer drones – with more and more drones in the air, it hasn't come a moment too soon. The vast majority of consumer and commercial drones in operation today are quadrotors, which have been widely adopted due to their overall efficiency.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. We present the collaborative humanoid robot ARMAR-6, which has been developed to perform a wide variety of complex maintenance tasks in industrial environments, collaborating with human workers. We present the hardware, software, and functional architecture of the robot as well as its current abilities.

Verity Studios, which took precision drone swarm technology from ETH Zurich and turned it into a spectacular live event display system, has announced a round of Series A funding totaling US $18 million from Fontinalis Partners, Airbus Ventures, Sony Innovation Fund, and Kitty Hawk. This is a lot of money for a company that most people may not know exists even if they view a Verity-powered drone show firsthand, but that's part of what makes Verity special: Everything they do is reliable, seamless, and safe, leading to experiences that have a truly mesmerizing effect. The reason we follow companies like Verity so closely, and the reason why we're happy when they get funded, is because they've managed to transition some fairly amazing robotics research into a successful business, which is a very difficult thing to do. The kinds of things that make Verity special come from over a decade of work at the Flying Machine Arena at ETH Zurich, led by Professor Raffaello D'Andrea, a lot of which we've covered in the past. For example, Verity's drones are fully redundant, able to recover from "a failed battery, a failed motor, a failed connector, a failed propeller, a failed sensor, or a failure of any other component ... through the duplication of critical components and the use of proprietary algorithms, which enable safe emergency responses to component failures."

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Two Cassies give you a tour of Agility Robotics, where they mostly don't believe in furniture: Final assembly can be done in just over a minute and a half, as long as you're willing to be sped up a little bit: Speaking of Cassies (and we do like speaking of Cassies), Michigan Robotics just got theirs (No. 001!) and we're expecting GREAT THINGS: My question now is whether all the robots are going to be called "Cassie," or whether each will (eventually) be renamed when it arrives at its destination. My other question now is whether the first Cassie was "000" or "001," and also why don't they think they'll be making more than a thousand Cassies, because that seems pessimistic.

Metallica's European WorldWired tour, which opened to an ecstatic crowd of 15,000 in Copenhagen's sold-out Royal Arena this Saturday, features a swarm of micro drones flying above the band. Shortly after the band breaks into their hit single "Moth Into Flame", dozens of micro drones start emerging from the stage, forming a large rotating circle above the stage. As the music builds, more and more drones emerge and join the formation, creating increasingly complex patterns, culminating in a choreography of three interlocking rings that rotate in position. This show's debut marks the world's first autonomous drone swarm performance in a major touring act. Unlike previous drone shows, this performance features indoor drones, flying above performers and right next to throngs of concert viewers in a live event setting.

Last year, Intel partnered with Lady Gaga on the Super Bowl Halftime Show to showcase its latest aerial technology called "Shooting Star." Intel did a reprise performance of its Shooting Star technology for Singapore's 52nd birthday this past week. Instead of fireworks, the tech-savvy country celebrated its National Day Parade with a swarm of 300 LED drones animating the night sky with shapes, logos, and even a map of the country. Intel's global drone chief, Anil Nanduri, explained, "There's considerably more operational complexity in handling a 300 drone fleet, compared with 100 drones in a show. You may be able to juggle three, but if you juggle nine, you may have to throw them higher and faster to get more time."

Knowledge Management is a term that goes in and out of favor. Whatever name you give it though, consistently capturing and reusing intellectual assets is a critical endeavor within an organization that values information- sharing. In addition to the social and organizational aspects of KM, a short list of systems supporting KM includes search, collaboration, and distance learning. Whether called KM or not, most companies have used email and calendaring for some time and, in a limited sense, already use a KM system: basic collaboration. Today--as far as KM in practice goes--enterprise search and retrieval seems to be giving organizations the most trouble.