Drone technology set to reshape disaster response, healthcare, environmental management, farming, and cybersecurity
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Updates every hour. Last Updated: 29-Jan-2026 10:11 ET (29-Jan-2026 15:11 GMT/UTC)
Drone technology is poised for remarkable progress across multiple domains, with next-generation systems set to transform disaster response, healthcare, agriculture, logistics, archaeology, environmental management, farming, and numerous other fields vital for human development. Next-generation drones are expected to have far greater endurance, including extended flight ranges, longer operational duty cycles, and enhanced resilience. These capabilities will enable sustained, long-duration missions, such as long-distance medical or commercial deliveries, as well as wide-area surveillance across densely populated urban environments and expansive forested regions.
New research shows that the mere smell of predators is enough to change deer behavior and limit browsing damage to tree saplings. The findings offer a potential tool for forest recovery and highlight the important role large predators play. The research is published in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Applied Ecology.
Agricultural waste that is usually burned or left to rot could play a far bigger role in tackling climate change if it were instead used in long-lasting building materials, according to new research from the University of East London (UEL).
Venkatesan Sundaresan, a Distinguished Professor of plant biology and plant sciences at UC Davis, has been awarded a Gates Foundation grant to develop self-cloning crops for Indian farmers. The five-year, $4.9 million project is a collaboration with researchers Myeong-Je Cho at UC Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), Viswanathan Chinnusamy at the ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute (ICAR-IARI), New Delhi and Ravi Maruthachalam at the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER-Thiruvananthapuram). The project aims to sustainably improve agricultural productivity by producing high-yielding crops that clone themselves, allowing farmers to save their superior seeds from one season to the next.
Within the next few decades, intensifying heatwaves could expose a significant share of Europe’s cattle to dangerous levels of heat stress. New research maps where and how millions of animals may be affected by mid-century.