Regardless of how many times you yell into that one friend’s ear that the world is not going to end this Friday, December 21, he or she remains unconvinced. They’ve already packed their basement full of Twinkies (what’s left of them at the supermarket) and Jell-O packets, bottled water to last several months, and some tactical gear in case aliens and zombies invade. Well, if they’re going to act like an insane person, the least you can do is help them out with some modern day tech and accessories.
For years, your friend has been convinced those rattling noises at night aren’t just leaves blowing in the wind. Since the Ouija board didn’t reveal much, maybe it’s time you let science help a pal out. The EMF Ghost Detector is an attachment for iPhones that looks for electromagnetic field radiation to recognize strange things human eyes cannot see. Your friend could theoretically use it to see some a visual EMF waves coming from the TV or microwave, but also under the bed or in the closet to check for the supernatural.
Of course a flash light is necessary for an impending apocalypse. Duh. But the Wicked Lasers Torch isn’t your average flash light. This thing is powerful enough to cook scrambled eggs and whole turkeys and probably light a zombie’s face on fire. The most clever weapons are ones disguised as ordinary objects – even if the flash light itself only has the power to last six minutes of torching per battery.
Sure, laugh now, but your friend will definitely have the last laugh when he or she catches zombies, aliens, thieves, pesky journalists, and cats approaching the front door with this giant security camera bundle. The all-weather cameras can record footage for up to 120 days into an included 500GB hard drive, and have night vision of up to 50 feet. The set also sports a lifetime warranty … if there’s anyone on the other end of that customer service line to tend to the requests.
Want to indulge in a fun experiment? Gift this Secret Decoder Ring to your friend for the holidays, then send them a letter filled with random, nonsensical words. Your friend will spend years trying to figure out what the powers beyond the human world are trying to communicate via snail mail, when all you did was randomly pound your keyboard for 2000 words.
Twinkies and Jell-O are pretty tasty, but they’re no match for these gourmet(ish) post-apocalyptic dried foods. Thrive offers a full line of dehydrated meals that cover more than just the basic fruits and vegetables; with this care package, your friend will enjoy a six-grain pancake mix with instant milk and powdered sugar, freeze-dried sweet corn and celery, and even freeze-dried roast beef and chopped chicken. If your friend follows the food regime included in the set carefully, that’s a full 2,200 calories per daily consumption. He doesn’t even have to leave his house!
Just in case the military decides to launch an electromagnetic pulse to wipe out all the electronics in the city, help your friend prepare with these EMP covers. The protective bags can guard EMPs of up to 49 dB so no radiation or satellite waves will get to the gadgets inside. Since spacesuits are kind of hard to come by on Amazon.com, maybe you should consider buying a few of these bags for your conspiracy theorist friends and tell them to stitch together a track suit.
So, cops are outside of your friend’s house asking him to come outside and face the fact that the world has not gone to bits and people are not out to get him. Your friend has one last shot at fighting them off with this mobile phone signal scrambler. What, you think calling his mom is gonna convince him everything is alright? With this little baby, phones running on CDMA, GSM, 3G, and DCS PHS won’t stand a chance of functioning so don’t bother calling to say the apocalypse didn’t happen. Now, seriously, get off his lawn. He might have land mines in there.
Depending on the brand you choose, you might be crafting a dollar store hat or Reynolds Wrap heavy duty stuff for your precious friend. Your paranoid friend will probably want about 50, so get crafting.
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.