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Titan Aerospace recently offered the Solara series of such drones: which can fly continuously for nearly five years, charging its own battery high above commercial aircraft through the use of solar power. The larger Solara will be 60 meters wide and have the ability to carry about 250 pounds.

Cruising speed for the Solara is about 65 mph, and the unmanned craft will have an operating range of over 2.8 million miles.

The Solara series are designed to be a fraction of the cost of a satellite, but operate many similar tasks, such as surveillance, crop-monitoring, weather and disaster oversight, or any other monitoring that low-altitude satellites track.

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Titan Aerospace is based out of New Mexico, and a report from Breaking Defense finds that defense and intelligence customers such as the CIA, NRO and NGA are the most obvious interested buyers. The company has reportedly held preliminary talks with intelligence agencies about the use of the Solara aircraft.

Harnessing fusion – the process that powers the Sun – could provide an unlimited and cheap source of energy.

But to be viable, fusion power plants would have to produce more energy than they consume, which has proven elusive.

Now, a breakthrough by scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) could boost hopes of scaling up fusion.

NIF, based at Livermore in California, uses 192 beams from the world’s most powerful laser to heat and compress a small pellet of hydrogen fuel to the point where nuclear fusion reactions take place.

The BBC understands that during an experiment in late September, the amount of energy released through the fusion reaction exceeded the amount of energy being absorbed by the fuel – the first time this had been achieved at any fusion facility in the world.

This is a step short of the lab’s stated goal of “ignition”, where nuclear fusion generates as much energy as the lasers supply. This is because known “inefficiencies” in different parts of the system mean not all the energy supplied through the laser is delivered to the fuel.

The Chinese Vice Foreign Minister, Zhu Guangyao, told America’s deadlocked politicians on Monday that “the clock is ticking” and called on them to approve an extension of the national borrowing limit before the federal government is projected to run out of cash on 17 October.

“We ask that the United States earnestly takes steps to resolve in a timely way the political issues around the debt ceiling and prevent a US debt default to ensure the safety of Chinese investments in the United States,” Mr Zhu told reporters in Beijing. “This is the United States’ responsibility,” he added.

Another 250 million people came online in 2012, but 4.4 billion people remain unconnected, said the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

Ninety percent of those not online live in developing countries.

The ITU also said there would be 6.8 billion mobile-cellular subscriptions -? almost as many as there are people on the planet — by the end of the year.

As CBS 2’s Jennifer McLogan reported Monday, officials at Weber Middle School in Port Washington are worried that students are getting hurt during recess. Thus, they have instituted a ban on footballs, baseballs, lacrosse balls, or anything that might hurt someone on school grounds.

Tossing a football during recess has long seemed to be a rite of passage for kids in the school community.

“I think we need the soccer balls, the footballs and everything, so we can have some fun,” one student said.

Apparently, protecting her patients is grounds for dismissal. At least, that is the case at Northwestern University in Illinois.

Despite being promoted to Valve Director in 2006, Dr. Nalini M. Rajamannan was terminated in 2008 after reporting the use of non-FDA approved, experimental medical devices being implanted in patients without their knowledge.

The doctor conducting these human experiments, Dr. Patrick McCarthy, was testing his own inventions, an IMR annuloplasty device and a Myxo annuloplasty device manufactured by Edwards Lifescience.

The e-mails show that the companies paid as much as $25,000 to attend any given meeting of the panel, which had been set up by two academics to provide advice to the FDA on how to weigh the evidence from clinical trials. A leading FDA official later called the group “an essential collaborative effort.”

Patient advocacy groups said the electronic communications suggest that the regulators had become too close to the companies trying to crack into the $9 billion painkiller market in the United States. FDA officials who regulate painkillers sat on the steering committee of the panel, which met in private, and co-wrote papers with employees of pharmaceutical companies.

The FDA has been criticized for failing to take precautions that might have averted the epidemic of addiction to prescription drugs including Oxycontin and other opioids.