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(credit: Mitchell Weinstock)

Director Gavin Hood is bursting to talk about his new project, Eye in the Sky. That's probably because his film, which debuts this weekend, involves many modern-day topics of discussion—things like the evolution of drone technology or the ethical implications of autonomous warfare.

What catches your eye first about Eye in the Sky is the tech. Even though Hood's movie is about drone warfare, the military-grade drone cruising over Kenya is not really what Eye in the Sky is about. Besides a few quick CGI-ish shots of a Reaper in flight, the bulk of the spying is done by an amusingly mechanical hummingbird drone and a tiny, camera-rigged mechanical beetle. Hood said that while the two drones aren't exactly plucked from a current military reality, both are based on prototypes that have been built (in the case of the hummingbird) or described as micro-air vehicles or MAVs (in the case of the beetle).

The director added that he didn't want to get too hung up on what's current today, because drone technology is changing quickly:

(credit: Getty Images)

Frieda Klotz visited the ‘world’s first cyborg fair’ with one question: are cyborgs a real thing, or are these people just kidding themselves? Her article first appeared on Mosaic and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Michael Bareev-Rudy never expected to have his finger implanted with a magnet. But in November 2015, the 18-year-old decided to embed a 3 mm x 1 mm magnet in his index finger at an event held in Dusseldorf, Germany. A crowd gathered to watch as a man in a smart grey suit and green surgical mask carefully sliced open the sandy-haired 18-year-old’s finger.

“After this he cuts with a scalpel on the side of my finger—yes, he cuts my finger open,” Michael recalled moments later, looking decidedly pale as he smiled nervously before the flashing cameras. After sterilizing the table and numbing Michael’s finger with a local anesthetic, “he uses—I don’t really know how to describe this tool—it was like a pen, sharp on the end with a little spoon on the top. He carved a tunnel through my finger to get the magnet inside and then he tried to put it there.” Because the magnet refused to slip easily into the young man’s finger, they had to try six times before succeeding.

Don't let the flowers fool you; it's going to be a deadly spring.

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage right here—and let us know what you think. This review contains NO SPOILERS of the Pandemic Legacy experience.

Pandemic Legacy is, at this writing, the best board game ever made. That's not my judgment—it represents the collective wisdom of Board Game Geek users, who have catalogued more than 82,000 games and have rated Pandemic Legacy the best of the lot.

That's high praise for a game that only appeared a few months ago at the end of 2015. So what makes it so remarkable?

(credit: Mapbox)

In a sign that freewheeling, well-funded Bay Area startups are becoming more cost-conscious, the on-demand grocery delivery service Instacart recently told its couriers that it would be cutting pay rates by as much as 63 percent.

According to the Wall Street Journal, San Francisco drivers who pick up bags at grocery stores, for example, will make $1.50 per drop-off rather than the previous $4. Instacart has also made a 50 percent cut, down to $0.25, on the commission that it pays per item to drivers when they are shopping in-store.

"After these changes our shoppers will earn, on average, an effective rate of $15 to $20 per hour, which is both in line with historical levels and strongly competitive within our markets," Hyeri Kim, an Instacart spokeswoman, told Ars in a statement.

(credit: Wire)

The market for secure messaging has become so crowded that it's hard to tell one provider from another. That's why a new Swiss startup called Wire announced Thursday that its end-to-end encrypted messaging app (also called Wire) would now include secure video calling as well.

Wire has struggled so far to come anywhere close to other widely-used messaging apps like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. The company did not immediately answer Ars’ questions about how many users have installed it. In its marketing materials, Wire "offers itself as an alternative to other companies who seek to monetise users through the sale of customer data." The app is entirely free to use across all platforms.

The open-source app was launched over a year ago on OS X, Windows, iOS, and Android. Founder Janus Friis previously helped create and launch Skype, and he has brought on a number of alumni from that company including CEO Jonathan Christensen and Estonians Siim Teller and Priidu Zilmer.

(credit: FOX 13)

A Florida county sheriff has threatened to arrest Apple CEO Tim Cook, were a situation to arise similar to Apple's resistance to government pressure in the ongoing San Bernardino terrorism investigation.

Last month, the government obtained an unprecedented court order under the All Writs Act, an obscure 18th-century statute, which would compel Apple to help. If the order stands up to legal challenges, Apple would be forced to create a new customized iOS firmware that would remove the passcode lockout on the seized iPhone 5C. Apple has said both publicly and in court filings that it will fight the order as much as possible, and the company has drawn support from many cryptographers, tech companies, and even the husband of a survivor of the attack.

Speaking at a press conference Wednesday that was published by FOX 13, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd described a recent murder case that his office had worked on. Judd said that the murder suspects took photos of their victim on their smartphones, but then later gave detectives the passcodes to unlock their phones.