Ohio is now the fifth U.S. state to pass a law permitting the use of delivery robots on sidewalks and in crosswalks statewide.

Republican Governor John Kasich signed off on the state’s budget on Friday, which included a provision that permits the use of unmanned sidewalk delivery robots.

The Ohio statute comes less than a week after Florida became the fourth state in the country to create a similar law. Wisconsin, Idaho and Virginia likewise passed state legislation to allow for the use of delivery robots earlier this year — all with the help of Starship Technologies.

Starship makes a delivery robot designed to ferry food or items ordered online straight to customers’ doorsteps. The Estonian startup, founded by Skype co-founders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis, has sent lobbyists to help champion and pass all five state proposals.

The robot delivery company isn’t currently operating in any of the states where it has worked to pass the robot laws. Nor has it shared concrete details on plans to start in any of the five states, though a representative said Starship hopes to begin a pilot in Florida sometime this year.

Ohio’s new robot law allows for the machines to operate on sidewalks and in crosswalks in the state, so long as they weigh less than 90 pounds and travel at speeds of less than 10 miles per hour. The robots can rove unmanned, but a person is required to be in the loop remotely to take over operation in case something goes awry.

All the other state laws have near identical provisions, with weight limits ranging from 50 to 90 pounds.

“We can’t operate on a permanent basis before there is a law,” said Allan Martinson, the COO of Starship, in an email.

But even though Starship sees passing these laws as a natural prerequisite for its business model, that doesn’t mean that the company is in turn clearing a path for its competitors to one day operate their robots, too.

The weight limit baked into all the laws permit robots that weigh less than the robots of at least one of Starship’s competitors. Take Marble, for example, a California-based robot delivery company that makes a machine that outweighs at least four of the state weight limits (Marble wouldn’t specify exactly how much their robot weighs). The company would likely need to pass special provisions to be able to one day operate its robot in those states.

Starship says that in many cases the company targeted states based on prior relationships it had with local lawmakers, particularly those involved in sponsoring bills on testing self-driving car technologies, like Senator Jeff Brandes in Florida, said Martinson.

Still, Starship has yet to pass legislation in a state with a major urban population center, like New York, Chicago or Los Angeles, nor has the company run a program in the United States yet where its robots travel without a person present with the machine.

After all, it’s hard to imagine one of these robots would last very long on its own in a bigger city without getting stolen or vandalized on its way to deliver a pizza.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Tomorrow evening, Elon Musk’s interplanetary space travel company, SpaceX, will launch a Falcon 9 rocket, its third in a 10-day span.

The rocket will be sending a communications satellite, the Intelsat 35e, from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida into a geostationary orbit, some 23,000 miles above Earth.

SpaceX will not attempt to land the Falcon 9’s rocket booster for reuse after this launch, the company said in a statement. This may be because the payload is so heavy and it’s going into such a high orbit that the mission requires more fuel, which won’t leave the rocket with enough to make it back to land.

Watch the launch live Sunday at 7:36 pm ET / 4:36 pm PT here:

Last Sunday, June 25, SpaceX sent a new Falcon 9 rocket into space to deliver a set of Iridium satellites.

That launch came just two days after SpaceX launched a rocket that Friday, which was the second time in the company’s history it successfully landed a recycled rocket. The rocket booster returned to Earth to land on SpaceX’s drone ship, named “Of Course I Still Love You.”

Reusing rockets is central to SpaceX’s mission to lower the cost of space travel. Musk, after all, wants space travel to become cheap enough for humans to one day colonize Mars. But rockets are typically too damaged after launching to be used again, and building a rocket can cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

For perspective on the cost of space travel, take what happened in 2015 when a Falcon 9 disintegrated after takeoff. SpaceX lost around $260 million with that mission, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

On Friday, the Japanese carmaker Toyota shared footage of its robot designed to help people with limited mobility. It’s the first time this robot has been put to work in an American home.

The robot, which Toyota calls a Human Support Robot, or HSR, stands a little over four feet tall. It has one arm with a gripper; instead of legs, it roves around flat surfaces on a wheeled base. The robot can be beckoned with a touchscreen controller.

Toyota has already been putting its robots to work in Japanese hospitals for the past few years. But for U.S. trial, the robot visited the home of Romulo “Romy” Camargo, a decorated war veteran who suffered injuries in Afghanistan that left him paralyzed from the neck down. His disability makes routine movements like fetching a glass of water or opening a door incredibly difficult — all tasks the HSR can help with.

In the video, Toyota researchers place stickers on objects around the room that help the HSR locate or identify them, like a water bottle or a push button to open an automatic door.

HSR isn’t Toyota’s only robot aimed at helping people with limited mobility. In April of this year, the carmaker launched a rental service for its robotic leg brace in Japan, called Welwalk, designed to help partially paralyzed people walk and rehabilitate. That system will cost 1 million yen (about $9,000), on top of a 350,000 yen (about $3,000) monthly fee — not cheap.

Japan has one of the largest aging populations in the world, with over a quarter of its 127 million people over the age of 65, according to 2015 data from the World Bank. That’s compared to about 15 percent in the United States. This large, potentially vulnerable group is part of the motivation behind why companies like Toyota and Honda are working on robots that will help people with limited mobility gain a greater level of independence.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Today the government of Malawi opened a new air route in partnership with the United Nations Children’s Fund for testing the viability of drone delivery in the region.

Drone delivery makes sense in landlocked Malawi, a country that suffers from dangerous flooding. Roads are often inaccessible and supplies are difficult to ferry to remote areas.

“Malawi has limited road access to rural areas even at the best of times, and after a flash flood earth roads can turn to rivers, completely cutting off affected communities,” said UNICEF Malawi Representative Johannes Wedenig in a statement.

The corridor — which covers a 25-mile radius surrounding the Kasungu Aerodrome in Central Malawi — is intended for testing the technology not just for deliveries, but also for disaster response. A drone can be used to collect aerial images of affected areas after a flood or an earthquake to help send relief.

The route will also be used to test the viability of using drones to beam down internet connectivity or cellphone coverage when infrastructure fails in an emergency.

Malawi isn’t the only country in Africa using drones to deliver critical supplies to remote places. In October of last year, the company Zipline began a program in Rwanda to deliver blood and plasma to clinics in the rural western part of the country.

With Zipline, health-care workers can request a blood drop off and within 30 minutes a drone arrives with the delivery.

That program was launched in partnership with the UPS Foundation, the shipping giant’s charitable arm, and Gavi, a vaccine fund backed by Bill Gates. The Rwandan government is paying for the service.

Meanwhile in the United States, drone delivery is still not legal if the aircraft is flying beyond the operator’s line of sight. But companies have still been testing delivery solutions. Flirtey, for example, made 77 deliveries in November last year between a 7-Eleven convenience store and customers’ homes in Reno, Nev.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Major corporations across the world have been hit by a wave of ransomware attacks that encrypt computers and then demand that users pay $300 to a bitcoin address to restore access.

While countries across Europe — the United Kingdom, Ukraine, Spain and France, to name a few — were hit hardest by the outbreak, the virus has now spread to the United States.

Today, one of the largest drug makers in the U.S., Merck, reported being infected by the malware, as did the multinational law firm DLA Piper, which counts more than 20 offices in the U.S.

Heritage Valley Health Systems, a health care network that runs two hospitals in Western Pennsylvania, also confirmed in a statement to Recode on Tuesday that it was a victim of the same ransomware attack that has spread around the globe.

At least one surgery had to be postponed because of the hack, according to a woman interviewed by Pittsburgh Action News 4.

The malware, which has been dubbed NotPetya, has been confirmed by multiple security firms to resemble the WannaCry ransomware attack, which in May infected hundreds of thousands of computers by taking advantage of a National Security Agency hacking tool called Eternal Blue.

That exploit was leaked last April by a hacker or group of hackers called ShadowBrokers. Eternal Blue takes advantage of a vulnerability in the Windows operating system, for which Microsoft issued a patch earlier this year. Not all Windows users installed the update — hence one of the reasons WannaCry was able to spread.

“Our initial analysis found that the ransomware uses multiple techniques to spread, including one which was addressed by a security update previously provided for all platforms from Windows XP to Windows 10,” Microsoft said in a statement to Recode.

Microsoft further advised users to exercise caution when opening files in emails from unknown sources, since malware is often spread through email attachments. Microsoft also noted that its antivirus software is capable of detecting and removing the ransomware.

Ukraine appears to have been the country most affected by today’s ransomware outbreak, according to a chart shared in a tweet by Costin Raiu, the director of a global research team with Kaspersky Lab.

Government agencies across Ukraine reported being hit, including the public transportation system in Kiev, the state telecom company and the country’s central bank. Danish shipping giant AP Moller-Maersk’s computer systems were also infected by the virus, as were the Russian oil conglomerate Rosneft and the multinational advertising firm WPP.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.