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Fly your drone for 1.87 million years, and a plane might hit it once. (credit: Kevin Baird)

The Federal Aviation Administration has pushed forward strict rules for the operation of small consumer drones. Drones weighing more than 250 grams (a little more than half a pound) will have to be registered with the FAA, and there are restrictions on where they can be flown. The regulations are largely prompted by fears that the toy-sized flyers will pose a danger to commercial and civil aircraft—fears that new research suggests are unfounded. That research, shown in a study just published by George Mason University's Mercatus Center, was based on damage to aircraft from another sort of small, uncrewed aircraft—flying birds.

Much of the fear around drones hitting aircraft has been driven by FAA reports from pilots who have claimed near-misses with small drones. But an investigation last year by the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA) found that of the 764 near-miss incidents with drones recorded by the FAA, only 27 of them—3.5 percent—actually were near misses. The rest were just sightings, and those were often sightings that took place when drone operators were following the rules. The FAA also overcounted, including reports where the pilot said explicitly that there was no near miss and some where the flying object wasn't identified, leading the AMA to accuse the FAA of exaggerating the threat in order to get support for its anti-drone agenda.

There hasn't yet been an incident in which a drone has struck an aircraft. But bird strikes (and bat strikes) do happen, and there's a rich data set to work from to understand how often they do. Researchers Eli Dourado and Samuel Hammond reasoned that the chances of a bird strike remain much higher than that of an aircraft hitting a drone because "contrary to sensational media headlines, the skies are crowded not by drones but by fowl."

(credit: CSPAN)

With a tiny change to the rules, the Food and Drug Administration made it a bit harder for Martin Shkreli and his ilk to make a killing by jacking up the prices of off-patent drugs.

The regulatory tweak now allows a “priority” or expedited review process for any generic drug that would compete with an off-patent drug that is only made by one company—the kinds of drugs that have seen skyrocketing price tags of late. The faster review process could cut the window for a pharmaceutical company to have a monopoly over the drug from years to months, sharply cutting profits from potential price gouging.

In an e-mail to Bloomberg, FDA spokesperson Sandy Walsh wrote that the agency expects as many as 125 generic drug applications will now be fast-tracked due to the change. The agency previously expedited reviews of generics that would compete with newly off-patent brand name drugs.

After first being teased at E3 2015, AMD has finally made its dual Fury GPU official. Dubbed the Radeon Pro Duo, the card combines two of AMD's top tier Fiji GPUs (as used in the Fury X and Fury Nano) onto a single card, resulting in a claimed 16 teraflops of compute performance. The price for such power? A mere $1499 (UK pricing TBC, but probably around £1200). The Radeon Pro Duo goes on sale in "early" Q2 2016.

While that price might seem steep, it is substantially less than Nvidia's most recent dual dual-GPU offering, the Titan Z, which launched at $3000 (£2399) before dropping to $2000 (£1499). AMD's previous dual-GPU card, the R9 295X2, launched at $1500 before dropping to less than $1000 months after launch.

You do get a lot for your cash, though. Both GPUs on the Radeon Pro Duo sport the full array of 4096 stream processors, 256 texture units, and 256 ROPs. There's 8GB of high bandwidth memory on board, split between the two GPUs, running at 1GHz on a substantial 4096-bit bus for 512GB/s of bandwidth. Like the Fury X, the Radeon Pro Duo is liquid cooled via an all-in-one unit with a 120mm radiator.