Swarms of flying robots, flocking autonomously like birds, have taken to the air over Geneva, Switzerland.

At Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale’s Laboratory of Intelligence Systems,  Sabine Hauert and Dario Floreano have found a way to make small, fixed-wing machines fly together, migrate and avoid crashing. The swarms can be used for imaging and mapping the ground. In the future they may fly on search and surveillance missions.

The swarming behavior is based on a three dimensional algorithm that represents the movements of schools of fish and flocks of birds. The algorithm, developed in 1986 by Crai...

Last night, New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly made a startling claim: that the NYPD has “some means to take down a plane,” in the event of another terror attack.

But don’t let your imagination run too wild: there’s no stealth jet emerging from 1 Police Plaza; there are no anti-aircraft missiles mounted on the top on the Williamsburg Bank. Kelly’s talking about a simple sniper rifle, which an NYPD helicopter crew could carry into the air, and target the engines of a plane. A small plane, I’m guessing.

Which makes Kelly’s eye-popping assertion, issued on Sunday’s edition of 60 Minutes,...