Weed culture is a particularly interesting pocket of Americana, with heavily stratified groups of consumers separated by their preferred method for getting high. Handheld vaporizers have become popular among low-key stoners over the past few years, while less discreet users might prefer joints, blunts, or bongs — “water pipes,” if we’re being technical.
The amusingly named Cloudious 9, a Fremont, California-based startup (and one of surprisingly few cannabis companies at CES this year), wants to bring those groups together via the Hydrology 9, a gadget that splits the difference between vaporizers and water pipes, all while looking like a contemporary pepper grinder. We invited Cloudious 9’s founder and CEO, Richard Huang, to come by our booth at CES and show off his invention.
The Hydrology 9 largely operates like a vaporizer; open the bottom of the unit, put in some (preferably ground) flower, and the microchip processor precisely monitors oven temperature to ensure you’re not inhaling unwanted carcinogens during use. “You can see it as the modern version of a water pipe,” says Huang. “We saw that a lot of companies in the cannabis space are racing to create the smallest, most portable vaporizer, but the water pipe [market] is underserved. Our target audience could be anybody, but especially casual users who don’t want to have a big ol’ bong in their house.”
While most modern vaporizers feature small, straw-like mouthpieces, the Hydrology 9’s detachable, borosilicate glass mouthpiece is intended for your lips to fit inside (like with typical water pipes). With a magnetized cap, you can be sure dust will never get in when you’re not looking. The H9 is built from borosilicate glass and “spacecraft-grade” aluminum alloy, and outfitted with precise heating control that allows users to select from five separate temperature levels.
What sets the H9 apart from most vaporizers is its water chamber, which is sealed with a unique, 360-degree antileak mechanism. Vapor flows through the water chamber, so users get both the “cooling effect” of a water pipe and the clean vapor of a vaporizer. Hydrology 9 is currently available for $250 via the Cloudious 9 website or at select retailers nationwide.
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.