With a fistful of sand, the Curiosity Rover is giving NASA a glimpse of Mars’ sand dunes. With 115 stitched photos, it’s giving everyone else a glimpse of what it would be like to stand in the middle of those rippled piles of Martian dirt. On Thursday, NASA released a 360-degree panorama of Curiosity’s examination of the Ogunquit Beach dunes, a study that spanned from February to early April.
NASA says the study is the first time sand dunes have been studied anywhere outside of our own water-filled planet. Curiosity’s exploration is helping NASA scientists study how the winds shape the dunes, which each have different patterns yet are bunched fairly close together. The group is also looking at whether or not that wind plays a role in where the planet’s minerals eventually wind up.
The linear shaped dunes in the 360 video, along with crescent-shaped dunes about one mile away, make up the planet’s Bagnold Dunes, which NASA says is several miles long on the northwestern side of Mount Sharp. Both dunes and the mountain were part of Curiosity’s recent research. “There was another key difference between the first and second phases of our dune campaign, besides the shape of the dunes,” California Institute of Technology’s Mathieu Lapotre said. “We were at the crescent dunes during the low-wind season of the Martian year and at the linear dunes during the high-wind season. We got to see a lot more movement of grains and ripples at the linear dunes.”
Besides just making up for a pretty cool 360 image, photos were also used to measure the movement of the sand over time since NASA says the rover’s Environmental Monitoring System is no longer sensing the wind after two of the six sensors on board became inoperable after landing in 2012.
The Rover is carrying around that dirt sample in one arm and has already gathered some data using the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) inside. High winds and a potential drill feed issue are delaying the rest of the analysis, which requires the rover to pour the sand into ports for the instruments to analyze.
Curiosity is continuing to study the area around Mount Sharp, the same area that leads NASA to believe the planet was once home to several ancient lakes, including analyzing recurring slope lines for signs of H2O.
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.