Zoom into a computer chip: Watch this video to fully appreciate just how magical modern microchips are

• By Sebastian Anthony 
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I don’t think you appreciate just howmagical the computer chip at the heart of your smartphone or PC really is. In the case of a smartphone’s SoC, you essentially have a single less-than-a-square-inch package that enables you to do almost anything, from playing games, to accessing a cellular network, to contactlessly paying for your groceries. To do this, there are billions of tiny switches inside each chip that switch on and off up to

Oh great, humans taught a robot how to do karate

• By James Plafke

The Institute for Human Learning and Machine Cognition (IHMC) — which sounds like a facility where robots reprogram rebel humans to become sympathetic with the machine plight — taught its humanoid robot Atlas to mimic The Karate Kid’s famous crane kick. Standing 6-foot-2 and weighing a bulky 330 pounds for its height, the robot — named Ian —

DJI Inspire 1: An amazing 4K-capable drone for videographers and photographers

• By David Cardinal

Originally best known for it gyroscopic stabilizers, DJI has quickly become the top brand name in drones for photographers and filmmakers. Not content to rest on the success of its Phantom drone line, DJI has incorporated many of the top requests of its customers into its newly launched DJI Inspire 1. Featuring 4K video capture capability and retractable landing gear that stays out of the way of video clips, the drone is even easier to fly than its predecessors.

Facebook details its plans to bring drone internet access to the masses – but will monopolistic telcos stand idly by?

• By Joel Hruska 

Like Project Loon, Dronebook (not an actual product name) is designed to solve the problem of limited internet access across the globe. The existing map of internet coverage looks like this:Earlier this month, Facebook announced that it was developing its own drone-based plan for global internet coverage, to compete against the likes of Google’s balloon-based Project Loon. On Friday, Zuckerberg unveiled a more detailed paper on that proposal, discussing why the company believes that drones are a better technology than balloons, what it hopes to accomplish, and where it believes the market will go in the future.

Musk’s next mission: Blanketing the world with cheap internet access, via 700 low-orbit satellites

By Sebastian Anthony 

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Elon Musk, capitalizing on SpaceX’s unique ability to cheaply launch stuff into space, has announced that he’s working on deploying a constellation of some 700 satellites, for the purpose of bringing “very low cost” internet access to everyone on Earth. Satellite internet access could be very useful in rural parts of North America and Europe, but it’s the under-connected parts of the world (Asia, Africa, South America) that will be of more interest to Musk, both financially and