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Why didn’t I think of that? 8 useful objects you can 3D print right now

Just fork over the money for a newfangled 3D printer? If so, try out one of these 3D printables so you can save precious filament and make something actually useful. After all, a life-size Death Star model only gets you so far.

So, you’ve just bought a 3D printer for the first time in your life. Before you go wasting a ton of filament printing out just about anything you can think of, why not print out a few things that you can actually use? We’ve assembled a list of eight printable projects to get you started. From coin sorters to outlet shelves for housing your smartphone while its charging, these printable objects are some of the best — and most useful — that we’ve found on the web thus far. The best thing about them? They’re simple to print, so you’ll have plenty of filament left for more complex projects. Happy printing!

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.