There’s a massive offshore wind turbine in Østerild, Denmark breaking energy generation records left and right.
MHI Vestas Offshore Wind — a joint venture between Vestas Wind Systems and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries — showed off its 9 MW turbine prototype in December 2016, an upgrade to its V164-8.0 MW version. The Goliath of wind turbines generated nearly 216,000 kWh over 24 hours during its December test, breaking the previous record for energy generation record for a commercially available offshore wind turbine. To put the numbers in perspective, that’s enough energy to power the average American household for roughly 20 years.
“We are committed to delivering turbine technologies that [are] in line with the development of our industry, based on our 20+ years of offshore experience,” MHI Vestas Offshore Wind CTO Torben Hvid said in a statement. “Reliability remains a key enabler, and our approach to developing our existing platform supports this strategy.”
Increased energy production means that fewer turbines will be needed to reach energy needs and decrease the cost of energy.
“We are confident that the 9 MW machine has now proven that it is ready for the market and we believe that our wind turbine will play an integral part in enabling the offshore industry to continue to drive down the cost of energy,” Hvid added.
The turbine is 722 feet tall, with 38-ton blades that measure to be 263 feet in length. It’s blades have a total swept area of 227,377 square feet, which is larger than the London Eye ferris wheel, according to a press release. Its incredible size leaves it unparalleled in competition. There aren’t very many wind turbines likely to break MHI Vestas Offshore Wind’s record any time soon.
The first iteration of the wind turbine released in April 2014 and started breaking records shortly after. In October 2014, the V164-8.0 MW version broke the world power record for power produced by a wind turbine, reaching up to 16,000 British households.
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.