Drone photography is exploding, and people are pushing the envelope to come up with creative ways to use unmanned aerial vehicles as art. One man, Daniel Riley, thought outside the box and came up with a light-based performance that not only is incredible to watch, it may also have some practical application for law enforcement and search and rescue.
So what did Riley do that was so incredible? The photographer took an incredibly bright 1,000 Watt LED light panel and attached it to a Freefly Alata-8 drone. Riley is no stranger to working with bright lights — he created the 1,000 Watt light rig last year as a DIY project that he published on YouTube.
Earning the title of the world’s brightest DIY flashlight, the panel puts out an earth shattering 90,000 Lumens. The 10-pound rig is built using 100 LED chips that are installed in a row. Each 100 Watt module includes a heat sink and an individual driver that provides sufficient juice from the battery to power the light. Two lithium polymer batteries in tandem power the lights providing about 10 minutes of run time.
In his latest experiment with the 1,000 Watt lightbar, Riley upgraded his light bar with new lights that are brighter and that change color. He built a landing gear for the light rig and attached it to the Alta drone. The Alta drone has super bright navigation lights on each arm that make it easy to fly at night. Alta even has a custom configuration panel that provided Riley with the ability to change the brightness and color of the lights from his smartphone. With a third battery on board, the drone and the light bar can operate for up to 10 minutes.
The light is so incredibly bright it can light up a mountainside or an entire yard with the flick of a switch. Over the course of several months, Riley used the rig to film some incredible footage a night. Not surprisingly, he played around with lighting effects, bouncing light off buildings, bridges, and forests. The results are stunning from the point of view of photography, but they also showcase the rig’s ability to provide bright light in areas that are usually difficult to illuminate. This flying flashlight could easily make a great search and rescue or law enforcement tool for night operations.
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.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.