The only death from an injury during a Major League ball game was a hitter who was hit by a pitch back in 1920. Still, baseball is dangerous; balls come off the bat at over 100 mph. Dan Jennings of the White Sox, and before him Alex Cobb of the Tampa Bay Rays, suffered concussions when their pitches came right back at them. Safer Sports Technologies (SST) aims to combat that by upgrading pitcher’s baseball caps with carbon. Their campaign is up on Kickstarter.
All the head guards are made of corrugated rectangular curves of carbon that are padded one side and cleverly shaped to fit under the sweat liner of average baseball caps. The Pro Performance and Pro X are made for adults while the Prospect and Performance models are designed for youth under 12. These are upgrades over the original more expensive models, now made more accessible.
You’d think that with the risk involved, head protection in such a popular sport would be mandatory, but when a pitcher opts to use protection it makes the news. The SST head guards take our vanity and stubborn resistance to change into account by hiding a layer of armor in plain sight.
This obviously won’t protect anyone from line drives directly to the face – sorry Archie Bradley – but it will stop hits when it gets between the ball and the pitcher’s skull. The guards come in two pieces, right and left, from ear to ear. SST tested them at 60-94 mph and noted a difference of 120 G forces between protected and unprotected hits.
A bunch of big names have already started using them, the Mets, the Rangers, the Orioles, Dan Jennings, Colin McHugh, Marcucci Elite, and the Universities of Maryland and Missouri among them. This is a good step in the right direction even if it does leave a good deal of the pitcher still exposed. It seems baseball is following a general trend of increasing safety and protections in sports.
That said, as inferred from the ESPN video featured on SST’s Kickstarter page, it would be most logical for pitchers to wear something like a catcher’s or hockey goalie’s mask. That reality continues to go unacknowledged.
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.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.