If a mountain stands between you and your destination, the logical solution is to go around it – unless, of course, you find a way to go through it. What seems like an impossible feat to the rest of us, it is merely a challenge for determined engineers. Had Joseph Strauss listened to experts who deemed building a bridge from San Francisco to Marin County was impractical, then the Golden Gate Bridge may never have been built.
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By the end of 2016, it’ll be possible to travel through the Alps in a high-speed train, thanks to the opening of the Gotthard Base Tunnel. Not only will it shorten the trip for passengers, but make it faster to deliver goods. Like the Golden Gate, the Gotthard, along with these five other modern engineering marvels, not only cut down on travel time, but make it possible to get from one place to another – something earlier generations could only dream of. Here are six incredible recent projects that make traveling over land a little less daunting.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.