The New York Police Department is to start using quadcopters in its crime-fighting work. Trained cops will have access to various models — all made by DJI — for use in particular situations such as search-and-rescue missions, hostage situations, and hazardous material incidents.

Alphabet is bringing its drone service to Europe. On Tuesday, Wing, a drone delivery business owned by Google's parent company, said it'll launch in Europe in the spring of 2019, with the introduction of service in the Helsinki area of Finland. Wing has spent the past 18 months testing drone deliveries in southeastern Australia, according to its website, partnering with local businesses to deliver food, drinks, medicine and household items.

On December 1, 2013, Americans watched a segment on 60 Minutes about Amazon’s plans to deliver packages by drone in just “four or five years.” Well, it’s officially been five years. And Amazon’s failure to make drone delivery a reality is a great reminder that PR promises from big tech companies are often not worth very much. And frankly, it’s also an opportunity to be thankful that Amazon isn’t yet buzzing drones over our heads like it owns the skies.

Jeff Bezos boldly predicted five years ago that drones would be carrying Amazon packages to people's doorsteps by now. Amazon customers are still waiting. And it's unclear when, if ever, this particular order by the company's founder and CEO will arrive. Bezos made billions of dollars by transforming the retail sector.

The Johnson Indoor Track at MIT probably won't go down in history in the same way as Kitty Hawk has, but it was the scene of a first in powered flight. A team of researchers has managed to build the first aircraft powered by an ionic wind, a propulsion system that requires no moving parts. While the flight took place using a small drone, the researchers' calculations suggest that the efficiency of the design would double simply by building a larger craft.

Drone delivery really only seems practical for two things: take-out and organ transplants. Both are relatively light and also extremely time-sensitive. Well, experiments in flying a kidney around Baltimore in a refrigerated box have yielded positive results — which also seems promising for getting your pad thai to you in good kit.

A group of shocked cyclists captured video of the moment a drone operator nearly pulled off a high-tech bike theft. The video, recorded in Hustopece, Moravia, Czech Republic, shows the cyclists climbing a local landmark known as Lookout Tower and taking video of a drone flying nearby. The cyclists start scrambling down the tower when the drone lowers down to the ground and picks up one of the bicycles.

As drones become smaller and cheaper, experts urge people to use caution when flying near wild animals like this brown bear and her cub.

As drones become smaller and cheaper, experts urge people to use caution when flying near wild animals like this brown bear and her cub.

A Northwest Territories judge has reluctantly accepted a plea bargain for a man who repeatedly lied to police and flew a drone in airspace used by planes taking off and landing at the Yellowknife airport. It marks the first time somebody has been convicted under the Criminal Code of dangerous operation of an aircraft as a result of illegally flying a drone, according to RCMP.

Uber may be delivering burgers by drones as soon as 2021. According to a job listing spotted by The Wall Street Journal, Uber is looking to hire an operations executive to make drone delivery functional by next year and available for commercial use by 2021. The job post referenced UberExpress — which is the internal name for UberEats' drone delivery initiative — and said the executive would help "enable safe, legal, efficient and scalable flight operations" for the program.

Just a decade ago, who knew that we are going to witness the most jaw-dropping era of our lives in the near future.

The FBI is convinced that terror groups will use drones to carry out attacks on American soil, director Christopher Wray said Wednesday. Wray told a Senate committee hearing the threat of drones and other unmanned aircrafts is "steadily escalating" due to their widespread availability and ease of use.

Soon, perhaps even by the time you read this, the rules for flying remote-controlled aircraft in the United States will be very different.

A teenage girl who did not know where she was and called 999 to report that a man had raped her was found after police deployed a drone equipped with a thermal imaging camera. The 16-year-old called emergency services in the early hours of Saturday to say she was on land somewhere in Boston, Lincolnshire, with her attacker.

The Wild West days of unregulated recreational drones may be nearing an end. A bill close to passage in Congress would repeal the current exemption for hobbyists from regulations and for the first time require them to take a test before flying. It also says such operators must fly no higher than 400 feet and stay clear of traditional aircraft. They may have to eventually install radio identification signals on the devices.

When Reuters photographer Lucas Jackson headed to Greenland in June, he traveled with a heavy, oversized rolling bag containing a crucial piece of equipment to document climate change. Jackson, one of a handful of Reuters photographers licensed to operate a drone, spent seven rainy days camped alongside Greenland's Helheim glacier, near the small seaside village of Tasiilaq. Using an Inspire 1 Pro drone, Jackson captured more than 700 gigabytes of footage and images in Greenland.

A person with a brain chip can now pilot a swarm of drones — or even advanced fighter jets, thanks to research funded by the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. The work builds on research from 2015, which allowed a paralyzed woman to steer a virtual F-35 Joint Strike Fighter with only a small, surgically-implantable microchip. On Thursday, agency officials announced that they had scaled up the technology to allow a user to steer multiple jets at once.

Drones could tell when people are tired and lower a coffee on an "unspooling string", IBM suggests.

The Colombian government has started to use drones to destroy the plants that produce cocaine. Small aircraft loaded with herbicide are being sent to search for illegal fields of coca. President Iván Duque has favoured the use of the unmanned aircraft to ensure that damage to neighbouring crops is kept to a minimum.