Do you remember fighting with your siblings for the top bunk? Well, be ready to relive your childhood — at 35,000 feet. Airplane manufacturer Airbus has filed a patent for two-story seating in its wide-body aircraft. This should come as little surprise from the company that introduced the world’s first full double-decker jetliner, the A380, which also happens to be the largest passenger airliner.
The patent, entitled “Passenger Arrangement for Vehicles,” shows a mezzanine level of seats reachable by steps. Second-story passengers sit right above those on the floor below. An excerpt from the document reads “In modern means of transport, in particular in aircraft, it is very important from an economic point of view to make optimum use of available space in a passenger cabin.” As airlines reach the limit of how many paying customers they can cram into a fuselage, you have to give Airbus credit for coming up with a way to pack in more.
Seating will be tighter than ever, but adjustable height on both levels creates some space. With both seats are fully reclined into flat beds, there should be more breathing room.
There are limitations to this design that make it unlikely to see development. Elderly or disabled passengers, pregnant women, and small children would have to be taken into account. This could only lead to additional delays in reservations and boarding procedures. Additionally, the FAA requires manufacturers to demonstrate that an airliner can be evacuated in 90 seconds. How would that be possible in the two-tiered arrangement? Passengers on the top floor would be jumping on the backs of their downstairs neighbors.
Simply filing for a patent does not mean the idea will see the light of day. Airbus is planning for what may come down the line, when a similar configuration might be feasible. This is just one of several hundred patents that the company files each year, as told to The Telegraph.
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.