If you’re looking to satisfy that need for speed, you don’t want to go pounding the pavement — instead, you should be hitting the waves. This week, Jaguar managed to set new world and national records with its battery-powered boat, the Jaguar Vector V20E. The previous world record for an electric speed boat was set in 2008, and stood at 76.8 miles per hour. But Jaguar blew past that old figure, recording an average speed of 88.6 mph on the 1 kilometer course on Coniston Water, England.
The small yet mighty boat was developed alongside racing experts at Jaguar Vector, as well as a team from Williams Advanced Engineering, who supplied the components for the electric drivetrain. While we don’t know exactly what the battery, motor, or controller specifications were, it seems that the boat leveraged similar parts and technology to those found in Jaguar’s Formula E all-electric street racing series.
While you may know Jaguar best for its automobiles, this announcement certainly proves that it’s also making waves in the boating industry. Plus, the company is looking to move away from combustion engines — in fact, as the Verge notes, Jaguar will stop producing cars based on these traditional engines by 2020, and its first all-electric car, the Jaguar I-Pace, is due to be released soon.
“Congratulations to Jaguar Vector Racing for setting a new benchmark for an electric boat with this world record,” said Mark Cameron, Director of Experiential Marketing, Jaguar Land Rover, in a statement. “Jaguar is at the forefront of electrification technology and our mission is to ‘Race To Innovate’ on track and on the water. Thank you to the whole team and our technical partner Williams Advanced Engineering for successfully transferring the technology we are using in Formula E with Panasonic Jaguar Racing from racecar to power boat.”
Over the course of the next year and a half, Jaguar Vector will continue to attempt record-breaking stunts across the U.K. and the world, the team noted.
“After 12 months of hard work, this is a fantastic result for the team and our partners and a great first step in bringing the power and versatility of electrification to the marine industry,” said Malcolm Crease, CEO, Jaguar Vector Racing. “It is a great honour for the Vector team to follow in the footsteps of Donald Campbell CBE and to set a world record on the historic Coniston Water.”
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.