If you’ve ever wondered just how strong carbon fiber is, this YouTube channel uploaded a video demonstrating its strength.
The Hydraulic Press Channel has uploaded a video comparing various pieces of carbon fiber composites, showing what will happen to one of the strongest man-made materials under immense pressure.
As its name implies, the Hydraulic Press Channel is dedicated to crushing just about everything with a factory grade hydraulic press. It’s run by Finnish factory owner Lauri Vuohensilta, along with his wife Anni. Since launching back in October of 2015, the channel has seen a meteoric rise, with 1.4 million YouTube subscribers. Fans like the hosts for their Finnish accents and their propensity to throw profanities during surprise outcomes.
Gcomposits, a Polish company that specializes in carbon fiber, sent Vuohensilta pieces of material to test out. A few shapes were put under pressure for the video, with varying degrees of success. First was a tube, laid sideways, which unceremoniously flattened out. Next, the man who loves to crush stood a tube up vertically and, under the immense pressure, saw it shatter into black dust. After another, larger tube was slo destroyed beyond recognition, the Finns moved into what they referred to as a “carbon fiber sandwich.” It really was just a brick made of carbon fiber.
Unsurprisingly, the carbon fiber brick fared far better than the hollow tubes. It barely showed any signs of breaking. Vuohensilta then switched it out for a smaller tool with 60% of the surface area of the previous one, increasing its pressure per square inch to almost double. Even then, it barely made a dent. Vuohensilta was still committed to making some kind of mark, and put a large nut (the kind you use for assembling, not eating) in between the press and the brick. Because the surface area of the nut was so much smaller, it finally broke through and lodged itself into the “sandwich.”
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.