What if you could catch a wiff of lemons while listening to Beyoncé’s Lemonade? Vapor Communications launched what it’s calling a digital scent speaker that lets you cycle through different smells to help boost your mood, cover up a stench, or bring videos into the fourth dimension.
The Cyrano, approximately the size of a four-ounce jar, has swappable scent capsules, or oChips, that can be combined into “mood medleys,” like “Get Relaxed” (honeysuckle, lavender, lilac, and vanilla), “Get Away” (guava, coconut, suntan, and venetian bellini) or “Get Energized” (pine, peppermint, orange ginger, and wingz). The device holds three capsules at a time, each containing four scents, like lilac, guava, peppermint, vanilla, and more. The idea is that it cycles from orange to lilac, so you don’t get used to one fragrance and stop getting the neurological signal to smell it. You use its app, oNotes, to “play” the scents and can watch specially made videos to go along with your olfactory journey. Users can also create their own personalized medleys to evoke a sense memory of their favorite vacation.
“Cyrano introduces to the commercial market a revolutionary new way to link one of the most important human senses to our digital world,” said David Edwards, Harvard professor and Cyrano inventor, in a press release. “Our moods are influenced by light as with sunshine and by sound as with music, but even more profoundly by scent, as with the fragrance of an orchid, or the aroma of hot chocolate. The olfactory nerve is the only sensory nerve with direct access to the brain. With Cyrano, we can design our lives with all three dimensions of sensorial control.”
For $150, you can preorder a Cyrano device; each oChip refill will cost $12.
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.