The race to reach Mars is heating up with Buzz Aldrin launching the new Buzz Aldrin Space Institute, whose primary goal is to encourage research that leads to the future settlement of Mars. The institute will be located at Florida Institute of Technology (FIT), where Aldrin will join the faculty as a Research Professor of Aeronautics and assume the role of Senior Faculty Advisor for the Institute.
The Gemini 12 and Apollo 11 astronaut is no stranger to Mars. Shortly after his retirement from NASA and the Air Force, Aldrin began crafting a master plan to reach the red planet. His original plan called for the use of the Aldrin Mars Cycler, a spacecraft system that would provide regular flights between Earth and Mars. Aldrin has refined his ideas over the years and holds three patents related to space flight. He now brings his knowledge and experience to FIT, which will promote his Cycling Pathways to Occupy Mars concept. This proposal calls for progressively challenging missions starting with smaller entities such as asteroids and eventually leading to a surface landing on Mars.
“I’m thrilled to be partnering with FIT in my new home state of Florida,” said Dr. Aldrin. “I am proud of my time at NASA with the Gemini 12 and Apollo 11 programs but I hope to be remembered more for my contributions to the future. FIT will play a key role in my ongoing legacy and Cycling Pathways to Occupy Mars. You ain’t seen nothing yet!”
Aldrin isn’t the only dreaming about a human trip to Mars. The privately-funded Mars One project is recruiting its first team of four people with plans to begin the colonization of Mars starting in 2027. The first team will establish a colony with a new four-person crew departing Earth every two years to join the colonists on Mars. NASA also is planning a manned mission to Mars in the 2030s and is conducting dome isolation experiments to prepare people for the long journey. Even billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk is on the Mars bandwagon with a proposed mission to the Angry Planet as one of the primary goals of his aerospace company, SpaceX.
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.