When we finally manage to make our way off of planet Earth and onto Mars, rest assured that we won’t have to sustain ourselves on dehydrated astronaut meals (like those not so enjoyed by Scott Kelly during his record-setting tenure in space). Instead, we’ll be able to grow crops in Martian soil. And we know this because we’ve already done it here on Earth. Dutch scientists have managed to grow crops, including four vegetables and cereals, in soil “similar to that on Mars,” and have deemed it safe to eat.
Sure, it’s not actually soil straight from the source, but it does contain many of the same elements as what might be found on the red planet. And not only were scientists able to grow crops, but they were able to grow them “abundantly.” Radishes, peas, rye, and tomatoes were all harvested in the course of the latest experiment, and contained “no dangerous levels” of heavy metals, according to the team from Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
“These remarkable results are very promising,” senior ecologist Wieger Wamelink noted of the results. “We can actually eat the radishes, peas, rye and tomatoes, and I am very curious what they will taste like.”
Scientists have actually been trying to emulate agriculture on Mars since 2013, and over the last three years, have raised 10 different crops. And while those grown on Martian soil on Earth are safe to eat, it’s unclear if plants actually grown on Mars would be consumable — after all, it’s unclear as to whether or not these crops would absorb heavy metals like cadmium, copper, and lead.
“It’s important to test as many crops as possible, to make sure that settlers on Mars have access to a broad variety of different food sources,” said Wamelink.
And more tests will soon be carried out on six more crops, including potatoes, to determine their viability on Mars. Researchers say they will be turning to a crowdsourcing campaign for the funds needed to sustain their work, and if I were a betting woman, I’d bet that people would be more than happy to chip in to improve their Martian descendants’ future diets.
NASA has ambitious plans for a trip to Mars within the next decade or so, and of course, Elon Musk has also expressed interest in colonizing Mars. And if we want to enjoy our time on the red planet when we get there, we better have some delicious produce to eat.
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.