The Dyson brand is known in the home appliance world as the premier source of all things that suck and blow, but perhaps things are making a bit of a turn now that Dyson engineers have begun working on things that can take flight. As part of the annual Challenge Dyson competition, where in-house engineers are asked to design something completely irrelevant to their daily jobs to exercise their imagination, this year’s objective was to make something that can fly primarily using Dyson device parts.
The challenge, also known as Airborne, saw engineers use anything from a Dyson digital motor to power propellers, to the signature vacuum ball base as the body of the manmade plane. The devices can’t just levitate to complete the task – designers must also navigate their planes through a short obstacle course, making sure not to pop the oversized balloons along the path.
It’s a cool project that reminds tinkerers everywhere that technology parts can be recycled and used in a magnificent amount of ways. Concurrently, it’s also neat to know that Dyson engineers can build things that fly. Albiet, some of the prototypes aren’t perfect (they are, after all, built with vacuum cleaner and fan parts) but the idea of a possible Dyson plane in the future? We’ll take one ticket on that ride please.
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.