Yep, a jellyfish – the inspiration for a tiny flying robot built by a team from New York University. While unconventional in its design, the jellyfish-bot could pave the way for the next generation of intelligence and environmental data gathering drones.
The jellyfish-bot, built by a team led by Leif Ristroph, an associate professor of mathematics at NYU, weighs just 2 grams, and has a wingspan of just 8 centimeters. At the moment, the robot connects to a tethered power supply, and has no steering mechanism. But Ristroph tells News Scientist that improvements in the design could allow the tiny bot to carry a battery, freeing it to fly anywhere.
Most flying robots – commonly called drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) – are made to resemble helicopters, airplanes, flying insects, or birds. These aircrafts, however, must constantly fight with the wind, and make adjustments to stay on course. According to Ristroph, his drone is made for the exact opposite purpose – to be picked up by the wind and carried away. In doing so, the jellyfish-bot is perfect for monitoring things like air quality, says Ristroph. Of course the military could also make use of such a drone – though Ristroph tells NBC News that he envisions it being used for some type of “nice peace-time application,” like environmental quality checks.
For now, the jellyfish-bot remains in prototype form, which can be seen below in this fascinating video that looks like it was shot sometime around 1910. (It wasn’t – it just looks that way thanks to the oddly antiquated production value.)
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.