Chairman and CEO of Aqua Metals, Dr. Stephen Clarke waved his hard hat triumphantly from the bulldozer cab to celebrate his company’s next big step. On Friday, August 23, Aqua Metals broke ground on its new AquaRefinery, a commercial battery recycling facility in McCarran, Nevada.
This newest addition to the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center will include a 125,000 square foot recycling plant. The company expects to begin production in the second quarter of 2016. Aqua Metals is aiming to hit an output of 80 metric tons of lead by fourth quarter 2016, their maximum output.
This isn’t your grandfather’s lead recycler. AquaRefining is a modular electrochemical process designed to produce ultra-pure lead from used lead-acid batteries. The clean, trademarked method produces almost no emissions and consumes less total energy, therefore making it more cost-effective than traditional lead smelting. The AquaRefining tech was created to improve the refining process, reducing costs and toxic waste produced during conventional lead-acid battery recycling. The concept means a better product with a higher lead yield, and all that done with a smelting plant that is less expensive to build than a conventional facility and less harmful to the environment.
Dr. Clarke said, “This next step toward commercial operations is an important milestone in our mission to build an environmentally sustainable lead recycling company and we believe we have chosen an ideal location.”
Aqua Metal’s AquaRefinery joins Tesla Motors’ new gigafactory, as well as Switch’s three million square-foot Supernap colocation data operation at the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center. The gigafactory is projected to employ 6,500 people and produce around 500,000 battery packs for their Tesla’s electric cars. The site will eventually support an increase of Tesla Energy’s line of storage batteries for home and business. Switch’s Supersnap will be a part of the company’s superloop system for those living and working within the cirucumference of Reno, San Francisco, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles .
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.