The Swedish government wants to make it impossible to be caught off guard by a speeding ambulance. Sure, their sirens are loud—but soon they’ll be able to take over your car’s radio.
Swedish students at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm have developed a way for emergency vehicles to transit radio signals to warn other vehicles of an approaching truck. It’s called the EVAM System, according to Phys.org, and it’s designed to send a signal over a specific FM radio band that’ll interrupt music or radio and display a test message over the system’s tuner display — so long as the car is equipped with a Radio Data System (RDS).
The number of crashes caused by muted sirens is on the rise, Florian Curinga, one of the students working on the project, said. That’s because of improved sound insulation in cars. “Often drivers only have a few seconds to react and give way to emergency vehicles,” Mikael Erneberg, another student involved in the project, added. “The optimal warning time is at least 10 to 15 seconds.”
Emergency vehicles in Stockholm will begin testing the system this year. The EVAM System can also predict how far in advance the message needs to be broadcast, depending on traffic speed, according to Phys.org. It may also be helpful in warning drivers about upcoming accidents, the students added.
“It fulfills three functions: improving accessibility for first responders, improving road safety, and [making] the working environment in transport better for vulnerable professions,” Curinga added.
EVAM will work on two-thirds of all vehicles on the road, Curinga said. All drivers need to do is have their radio systems turned on. If a message is broadcast then, they’ll see it—and hear it—from the tuner.
Curinga and Erneberg have founded a startup called H&E Solutions to market the product for a wider release.
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.