Machines have long been good at flying planes, says Sue Halpern in The New Yorker. “The first autopilot system, which involved connecting a gyroscope to the wings and tail of a plane, debuted in 1914.” But now the US military wants to develop a plane that can “fly and engage in aerial combat – dogfighting – without a human pilot operating it”.

Hong Kong is culling around 2,000 pet hamsters as part of the city’s draconian zero-Covid policy, because a handful of the rodents tested positive for the virus. Authorities have already seized hamsters from one pet shop. But an underground resistance operation has sprung up, says The Washington Post: foster carers are taking in the hamsters and concealing them from the long arm of the law.

When Megan Fox started going out with the singer Machine Gun Kelly, the actress gave him a necklace with a vial of her blood dangling from the chain. “Some people give, like, a handkerchief to their partner or whatever,” Kelly told reporters. “She gave me her DNA.” This week, the pair got engaged in a similarly bloody fashion. “Just as in every lifetime before this one and as in every lifetime that will follow it, I said yes,” wrote Fox on Instagram. “And then we drank each other’s blood.”

Octopuses are, like us, highly intelligent beings, say Emily Knight and Becky Ripley on BBC Radio 4’s NatureBang. But our brains have evolved very differently – hardly a surprise, given that our last common ancestor was a “flatworm that trawled the sea floor around 750 million years ago”. An octopus has a central brain wrapped around its throat, but its eight arms are also packed with neurons, allowing them to act independently. A severed arm can think and theoretically hunt by itself – so before the arm dies, an octopus can exist “in two places at once”.