Hydration is key to performance, but carrying water is yet another annoyance. During the brutality of summer, water can add a lot of weight to your kit if you plan on spending the day out on the bike. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to replenish your store from all that sweat-inducing humidity? Well as it turns out, there totally is. It’s called Fontus.
Created by design student and budding genius Kristof Retezàr, the device uses solar panels to generate electricity used to cool the opening at the top where the air blows in as you ride. The air then passes through a two-chambered cooler called a Peltier element, which causes any moisture contained inside of it to condense and drip into the bottle The moisture condenses and drips into the bottle. It’s that simple. It might not be ice cold, but it’s better than nothing.
Since it the device is designed to work with any kind of half-liter bottle, the possibilities for creating potable water in areas that don’t have easy access to it are huge. That said, there are two minor downsides to the design at the moment. First and foremost, it’s not well-suited for city riders. The moisture collected from urban air is often contaminated and therefore not fit for consumption (another reason to dread going out in New York on really humid days).
The other downside? The production of water is a little slow. Fontus can produce one drop of water per minute of use on a humid day, which is roughly half a liter per hour. To put that in perspective, the generally accepted doctor’s recommendation is to drink about between two and three liters of water a day. On a hot, humid day when you’re sweating and exerting a lot of energy, that can jump to five to six liters depending on the oppressiveness of the environment and how hard you’re pushing yourself. At this point, it’s good enough to keep you from dying if you get lost or, more likely, tide you over until you get to a larger water source.
The prototype cost less than $40, but Fontus is just an exercise at the moment. Retezàr has gone through dozens of different iterations to get the device to where it is now, so it’s a fairly safe bet the Fontus will continue to be improved. Let’s hope this young inventor gets some investors with manufacturing experience to make this a reality.
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.