Oh, Glad. You obviously have an amazing marketing team that somehow convinced us that sleeping inside garbage bags are a great idea! Well, at least it seems so in the case of the trash bags-turned-camping-tents the company gave out at the recent South by Southwest festival in Austin, TX this past March.
Indeed the concept, Glad recently unveiled its video campaign for its plastic camping tents that are reconfigured to promote environmental awareness and clean-ups after music festivals are said and done. After all, attending a festival, besides from the days’ worth of live music and activities, almost always result in smelly, dirty campgrounds, and it could take days for volunteers to clean up the mess. When you’re standing or walking around all day, the last thing you want to do is find the nearest garbage can to toss out your trash. We get it, we all get lazy.
With Glad’s trash bag tent, there are no excuses. The team distributed Glad ForceFlex tents to various SXSW festival goers to encourage them to leave the campsites as they found it – litter-free. And now that music festival season is in full swing, it’ll be fascinating to see if the trend picks up, especially with younger audiences.
The campaign, crafted by Miami-based advertising agency Alma, is an innovative approach to waste reduction and adding multipurpose uses to one product. And for those who can’t afford to buy full-sized fabric tents, these aren’t a bad option for a temporary camp tent that’s easy to transport, meant for one-time use, and promotes responsible living. Whether it’s actually comfortable enough to last through a night’s sleep without working up a sweat is another story, but hey, at least it’s only for a few days.
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.