Building off the success of cyclist Max Lippe’s 2,800 mile Electron Wheel bike trek from New York City to this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Electron launched the second-generation of its electric bike wheel at the 2018 trade show.
Promising to “electrify your bike in 30 seconds,” the Electron Wheel replaces the front wheel of most bikes and instantly transforms an ordinary bicycle into a modified ebike. The Electron Wheel does this through a variety of features that includes active hill assist, a top speed of 20 miles per hour, and a battery that lasts up to 50 miles of range.
It even has Google Assistant integration that allows riders to find directions with ease while riding. Google Assistant also allows riders to modify the amount of electronic assist they are getting from the Electron Wheel and learn about its battery power.
“We are taking the experience from the smart home or connected car and bringing it to the bike,” James Parker of Electron told Digital Trends. “You get all of the features of the app but [don’t] have to worry about having the dashboard on the handlebars. You can have the phone in your pocket, or in your backpack and say things like, ‘Hey Google, what’s my battery status?’ or [even] toggle between the different assist modes.”
Now available online for pre-order, the second-generation Electron Wheel sells for $799 and is expected to start being shipped out in February.
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.