When we finally do make it to Mars, we’re going to have to pitch a tent. Sort of. As humanity (led by NASA and Elon Musk) gets closer and closer to finding a new home off of Earth and on the Red Planet, the situation begs the question — what exactly are we going to live in? The answer, it seems, lies in expandable habitats.
To some extent, you really could think of them as high-tech tents. But the contraptions developed by Bigelow Aerospace and its founder Robert Bigelow are far more advanced than anything you’d find on the Appalachian Trail. Rather, Bigelow’s Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, is a compact, portable structure that expands to four times its size.
Bigelow Aerospace sent a prototype of its expandable habitat to the great beyond and attached it to the International Space Station (an effort that cost $17.8 million). When it’s inflated, BEAM will essentially give the ISS another bedroom for humans to work, sleep, and live in. For the next two years, scientists and astronauts will monitor BEAM and see how it holds up to the elements of space.
Bigelow has revealed little about the details behind BEAM’s construction, saying only that it’s composed of Kevlar-esque material and that it’s really, really strong. “It’s a multiple-layered structure, and when something hits the first outer layer, it fractures and breaks up,” he told CNN. But NASA isn’t just taking his word for it — rather, inhabitants of the ISS will go into BEAM, the first expandable space habitat, once every month to check things out and determine whether or not such a habitat could be used in future space travel and exploration.
“We would like to be part of the process of establishing a lunar station and other kinds of space outposts — maybe someday helping to support Mars ambitions,” Bigelow said.
Developing these sorts of habitats will be crucial to the future of international space programs. “To date we’ve thought about habitats as stations,” Jason Crusan, NASA’s director for Advanced Exploration Systems Division, told CNN. But that will soon change, he added. “All of our habitats in the future … will also have propulsion with the engines to take us to our destinations.” This is why NASA isn’t putting all its eggs in Bigelow’s basket — indeed, the agency is slated to invest $65 million in commercial industries over the next year or so, and already has contracts with major players like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Orbital ATK, to aid in the development of space homes.
So don’t get too comfortable here on Earth, friends. It may only be a matter of time before we’re floating around in expandable habitats miles above the atmosphere.
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.