The universe just got a little smaller, thanks to a new project from the European Southern Observatory in Chile. One of the primary goals of the project was to integrate the operation of its four Unit Telescopes together to create a Very Large Telescope (VLT), an optical telescope with the largest collecting area in the world.
Thanks to an instrument named ESPRESSO, that goal has now been achieved. ESPRESSO stands for Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet and Stable Spectroscopic Observations, meaning it will be used to hunt for planets in orbit around distant stars
By exploiting the light-gathering capabilities of the individual VLTs, it has the light-gathering capacity of a 52-foot (16-meter) optical telescope. “ESO has realized a dream that dates back to the time when the VLT was conceived in the 1980s: bringing the light from all four Unit Telescopes on Cerro Paranal together at an incoherent focus to feed a single instrument!” Gaspare Lo Curto of ESO said in a statement.
In addition to searching for Earth-like planets, ESPRESSO will also examine the very nature of physics by observing the light emitted by far-off quasars. Using a system of prisms, mirrors, and lenses, the light from each individual telescope is transmitted to ESPRESSO as far as 226 feet (69 meters) away.
Thanks to the stability of the telescopes and the construction of the facility, ESPRESSO can combine the observations from all four telescopes together, or use the light received from a single telescope, allowing for maximum flexibility during a single observation. Check out the images at the ESO website for some truly breathtaking photos from the observatory.
“This impressive milestone is the culmination of work by a large team of scientists and engineers over many years,” said scientist Paolo Molaro. “It is wonderful to see ESPRESSO working with all four Unit Telescopes and I look forward to the exciting science results to come.”
The ESO calls their facility at Gaspara Lo Curto a “game changer” for astronomy. It uses high-resolution spectrographs and wavelength calibration to enable observations that were never possible before.
“Go big or go home” seems to be the motto for these astronomers, and ESO isn’t done yet, according to Director General Xavier Barcons. “ESPRESSO working with all four Unit Telescopes gives us an enticing foretaste of what the next generation of telescopes, such as ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope, will offer in a few years,” he said.
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.