Tired of your time on Earth? Elon Musk may have a solution. The ambitious SpaceX founder and CEO is known for his — literally — out-of-this-world ideas, and the latest is a city on Mars. In a surprise appearance at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center last week, the entrepreneur laid bare his plans to colonize the Red Planet. Well, not completely. Rather, Musk teased the existence of a full-blown plan, which he will elucidate upon further in September, when he gives a much-anticipated talk at the International Aeronautical Congress (IAC) in Guadalajara, Mexico, in September.
While Musk’s initial topic of discussion centered around rockets and his Falcon 9, things took an interesting turn toward the end of his press conference, during which he spoke about the possibility of a SpaceX “City on Mars.” Musk is known for being well ahead of the curve when it comes to many of his concepts, a point he referenced during the discussion. “I think it’s going to sound pretty crazy,” Musk told the audience. “So it should be at least entertaining.”
To many, Mars seems like the next logical frontier — a new sort of Manifest Destiny for earthlings to conquer. “It’s a fundamental decision we have to make as a civilization,” Musk recently told a reporter in Hong Kong. “Mars is the next, natural step. In fact, it’s the only planet we really have a shot at establishing a self-sustaining city on.” That said, this is all mostly talk — at least until September.
But as far as how we’re going to get to Mars, Musk certainly seems to have figured it out. Reusable rockets, the executive says, are the key to future space travel. Calling reusability the “fundamental breakthrough needed to revolutionize access to space,” Musk has certainly proven the viability of his designs. He’s met with quite a bit of success in his latest rocket launches and landings, and with a track record like his, a city on Mars may not be that crazy of an idea after all.
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.