From the first total solar eclipse to grace the continental United States in nearly 40 years to the recent Leonids meteor shower, we earthlings have been spoiled with a regular collection of astronomical events this 2017. And although the year may be coming to an end, the awe-inspiring events just kept coming over the weekend. Recently, skywatchers had the opportunity to take in a rare supermoon overhead — the first and last supermoon of this year. Above, we curated a list of some of the best supermoon photos snapped around the globe but what exactly is a supermoon?
Rather than a perfect circle, the moon orbits around our home planet in an elliptical pattern and one full orbit around our planet takes roughly 29.5 days. Depending on the moon’s location on this elongated orbital trajectory, our faithful natural satellite is sometimes closer or farther away from our planet. At the closest point of this orbit (perigee), the moon is a more than 31,000 miles closer to our planet than it is during its farthest point of orbit (apogee).
Similarly, as most of us well know, the moon drifts through a sequential set of phases as it orbits our planet: Full, crescent, waxing, and waning gibbous. (NASA’s so-called “Dial-a-Moon” feature allows individuals to easily track and predict this shifting phases.) A “supermoon’ occurs when we observe a full moon during or near its perigee. Sunday’s supermoon appeared specifically 16 percent brighter and seven percent larger than the moon normally does. Per Jim Lattis, an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, this celestial treat occurs roughly once every 14 full moons.
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.