YouTube filmmaker Casey Neistat has won Christmas with an epic holiday-themed video that features him as snowboarding Santa who ditches the sleigh and replaces it with a human-flying drone. The footage was shot in Finland at a small village and ski area that looks like it pulled straight from your grandmothers Christmas card. It’s worth a few minutes of your time to watch Neistat and his high-flying holiday madness.
The highlight of the video is the massive drone that pulls Neistat up and over everything in his way. There is no commercially-available drone capable of flying a person, so Neistat and his team both designed and built the drone from the ground up. With its eight rotors, the octocopter has the power not only to pull Neistat on a snowboard up a hill but also to lift him hundreds of feet into the air. There is no two ways about it — this drone is a beast.
Neistat and cohort Jesse Wellens of PrankVsPrank fame pushed the envelope with the video using the human-powered drone along with cutting-edge 360-degree cameras to capture the stunning footage. Neistat doesn’t shy away from the extreme, going “far and high” with the drone on multiple occasions .
The most exciting segment of the video featured Neistat snowboarding up a slope while other skiers and snowboarders come racing down the mountain at him. It’s like watching a driver go the wrong way down a highway. Also impressive are the flight segments where Neistat flys through the air attached to nothing but the drone. You’ll be on the edge of your seat, shaking your head in dismay as you watch the insanity of him flying by drone.
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.