An unmanned aircraft that can fly a predetermined route costs a few hundred bucks to build and can be operated by iPhone.

the Federal Aviation Administration limits domestic use of drones to the government, and even those are under tight restrictions. FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said the agency is working with private industry on standards that might allow broader use once drone technology evolves. When it comes to paparazzi use of drones, she said, "our primary concern with that would be safety issues."

The ability to share software and hardware designs on the Internet has sped drone development, said Christopher Anderson, founder of the website DIY Drones, a clearinghouse for the nearly 12,000 drone hobbyistsaround the world.

The marsh is dotted with atmospherically controlled chambers that contain the same amount of CO2 that the planet may be exposed to by the year 2100 - roughly double what it is today. "They're like time capsules. We are simulating the future inside them," says Dr Megonigal. "We're trying to travel forward in time by subjecting these plants to the conditions the whole world will be subjected to a hundred years from now."

Coastal wetlands are the first defence against climate change and the 60-hectare (148-acre) salt marsh at the heart of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center has been home to some of the most important ecological studies of the past 40 years.

After being awarded a grant, Aralia Systems teamed up with Machine Vision Lab in what seems like a massive invasion of your privacy beyond "in the name of security." Building on existing cinema anti-piracy technology, these companies plan to add the ability to harvest your emotions. This is the part where it seems that filmgoers should be eligible to charge movie theater owners. At the very least, shouldn't it result in a significantly discounted movie ticket?  Machine Vision Lab's Dr Abdul Farooq told PhysOrg, "We plan to build on the capabilities of current technology used in cinemas to detect criminals making pirate copies of films with video cameras. We want to devise instruments that will be capable of collecting data that can be used by cinemas to monitor audience reactions to films and adverts and also to gather data about attention and audience movement. ... It is envisaged that once the technology has been fine tuned it could be used by market researchers in all kinds of settings, including monitoring reactions to shop window displays."  

The 3D camera data will "capture the audience as a whole as a texture."

the technology will enable companies to cash in on your emotions and sell that personal information as marketing data

This is the great unspeakable fact of American politics: it doesn't matter all that much who wins.

Military suppliers, big Wall Street interests, and the economic middle-class may do better or worse, but they always do pretty well.

I think you'll find that political parties tend to reliably support policies that have nice distributional consequences for the interest groups that support them. And I think you'll find politicians and court intellectuals brilliant at framing pay-offs to party stalwarts as policies absolutely necessary to the common weal.