If the word “diet” in Diet Coke doesn’t hit you over the head with how Diet Coke is supposedly good for your figure, the company has now paired up with ad agency Oglivy & Mather to create a new vending machine that’s skinnier than, well, you.
The ad campaign features the “Slender Vender” machine that was placed all around Paris to distribute sleek aluminum bottled version of the drink. It makes you look at the regular stuff in your fridge and think, “Ew, who wants to touch and drink out of those flabby fat cans? Get with the slim bottles!”
Touting itself as the world’s thinnest vending machine, the Slender Vender appears to be approximately one foot thick and can fit into most public spaces: Behind a photo booth, in an aisle of a bookstore, between mall escalators and airport benches, and more. Look carefully, or you may just miss it.
Although the new design boasts added practicality for extra placement locations, the thinness of the machine would also likely amount to less bottles stored. On the bright side, perhaps this will start adding jobs for Coke’s stock refill man. It’s not big enough to house webcams or Intel processors like its predecessor, but we’ll happily take one machine and stuff it into our New York-sized apartment… but only if Coca-Cola promises to make a Coke Zero edition.
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.