It was a busy week at the International Space Station (ISS), with two astronauts making lengthy spacewalks and installing equipment to welcome some new visitors. In preparation for the upcoming test launches of commercial crew capsules, astronauts installed some high-definition cameras on a crucial docking component that was originally designed for the space shuttle.
In a lengthy spacewalk that was broadcast live on NASA TV, commander Drew Feustel and engineer Ricky Arnold spent nearly seven hours connecting the equipment to the exterior of the station’s Harmony module.
The SpaceX Crew Dragon and the Boeing CST-100 Starliner will begin transporting astronauts to the ISS in 2020, ending the U.S. reliance on Russia’s Soyuz program.
To accommodate the commercial crew vehicles, NASA had already retrofitted the module with an International Docking Adapter back in 2016. The new cameras will assist crew members aligning the arriving spacecraft as they dock.
The equipment will also provide wireless access to laboratories and experiment modules on the ISS.
Due to technical setbacks, both SpaceX and Boeing are behind schedule on testing and deployment of their commercial crewed spacecraft. In May, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk denied reports that they were two years away from operational status, saying the Crew Dragon was on schedule for an August test flight and their first crewed mission in December.
For its part, Boeing wants to accelerate the timeline for its Starliner program, turning a crewed test flight into a fully operational mission.
It was the 211th spacewalk for maintenance on the station, and it also marked an important milestone. During the mission, Feustel surpassed recently retired astronaut Peggy Wilson for third on the all-time list of most experienced spacewalkers. It was the ninth spacewalk of Feustel’s career, and he’s now spent a total of 61 hours and 48 minutes working in the airless vacuum of space.
Astronauts have now spent a cumulative time of nearly 55 days outside the ISS.
In an exhilarating moment, Ricky Arnold took a ride on the end of an extendable robotic arm to reach some equipment that was too far away for an astronaut tethered to the station to reach. As he put it on Twitter, “Space was our office yesterday.”
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.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.