As the anti-shoe movement continues to gain steam, there’s been a corresponding flood of minimalist, barely-there footwear hitting the market lately. Those dorky Vibram toe shoes are everywhere these days, Nike’s new running shoes weigh practically nothing anymore, and there are dozens of other brands with their own take on the idea.
The latest entry into this burgeoning category is FYF — a unique new kind of footwear from Swiss Barefoot Company. Rather than lightweight shoes, FYF socks (short for Free Your Feet) are more like space-age wool socks with toughened soles. You know those cut-proof gloves that have stretchy sock-like material on the back, but texturized rubber dots on the palm? FYFs are almost the exactly same thing, but made for your feet instead of your hands.
Just like those aforementioned cut-proof gloves, FYFs are made from a specially-engineered type of wool that makes them much tougher than your average sock. The fibers of the sock are spun with a material called Dyneema (which you’ve likely used before whether or not you were aware of it). In addition to boasting a higher tensile strength than braided steel, it’s also abrasion-resistant, hydrophobic, flexible, and incredibly lightweight. This makes it ideal for use on your feet, as it can bend and flex like a sock, but still provide protection from things like sticks, thorns, and sharp rocks.
This isn’t the first sock that Swiss Barefoot company has made, either. FYFs are actually an evolution of the Swiss Protection Sock — the company’s inaugural product, made from a blend of Kevlar, polyester, and laminated PVC soles. The new models improve on this original idea with the addition of Dyneema, which has properties that are better suited for footwear applications.
FYF socks aren’t ready for primetime quite yet, but the folks at Swiss Barefoot Company have recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for production. The project has already surpassed its modest $10K goal (and is currently sitting at just over $75K), so if you back the campaign now and lock down a pair of FYF socks, it’s a fairly safe bet that they’ll arrive on your door this fall. Barring any setbacks in manufacturing, Swiss Barefoot Company expects to ship the first orders in October.
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.