For almost a decade, self-driving cars have graced public roads - but always with a person behind the wheel. Now Waymo is yanking the driver.

Baidu President Ya-Qin Zhang has a mild-mannered style at odds with his bold goals for "Apollo," the fast-growing, open-source self-driving car platform the Chinese tech giant launched in July.

From the window of our small plane flying low over the desert, Saudi Arabia's Empty Quarter looks as remote as the name suggests, with burnt-orange dunes stretching into infinity under the blinding sun. Not even the Bedouin nomads with their camels are visible, because there are too few of them amid the vast landscape. It's only when the plane bumps down on an empty runway at an outpost called Shaybah that it is clear that the world's biggest sand desert is not, in fact, empty.

Here's something that may sound like a contradiction in terms: low-fat pigs. But that's exactly what Chinese scientists have created using new genetic engineering techniques.