The U.S. government released a new report detailing some of the efforts underway to prepare for and respond to a catastrophe caused by a “near-Earth object” (NEO), an asteroid or comet that impacts the Earth. Included in the report are several strategies the government could take to avert such a collision, which has the potential for immense widespread destruction.
Such an impact is highly unlikely, given the vastness of space and the relatively tiny size of the NEOs in our solar system. “Fortunately, this type of destructive event is extremely rare,” White House official Aaron Miles told Bloomberg.
The report breaks the NEOs into five general categories by the potential of impact devastation, ranging from “none” (the shooting stars we see in the sky all the time) to “global” (the event that led to the end of the dinosaurs).
Even relatively small objects can cause extensive devastation because they’re traveling at such high speeds. In 1908, for example, an object about 150 feet across exploded over Tunguska, Russia, leveling more than 800 square miles of forest. The report estimates that such an event over New York City would result in millions of casualties.
Luckily, we’re getting a lot better at tracking the most dangerous objects. In conjunction with the International Asteroid Warning Network and the United Nations, NASA has documented 96 percent of the largest “planet-killers,” according to Lindley Johnson, a planetary defense officer for NASA. The agency is currently tracking some 18,310 NEOs, with 8,000 of those in the “global” category.
On the other hand, there is a chance that a rogue object could suddenly appear from interstellar space, giving us mere months to prepare. That was the case with ‘Oumuamua,’ a strange cigar-shaped asteroid that was apparently just a visitor that cruised quickly into our solar system, slingshotted around the sun at 196,000 miles per hour, and departed.
The report encourages preliminary planning and designs for three different “NEO deflection” missions:
In the short term, the administration wants to increase funding for missions like the NASA Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which will test some of these theories by crashing a spacecraft into the orbiting moonlet of a dual asteroid.
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.