Those building blocks you just love to step on in the middle of the night are about to reduce their impact on the environment. Lego announced that its leaves, bushes, and trees pieces will be made from a plant-based plastic sourced from sugarcane. They will make their first appearance in Lego sets as early as this year. Production has already begun on the sustainable elements.
“At the Lego Group, we want to make a positive impact on the world around us, and are working hard to make great play products for children using sustainable materials,” Tim Brooks, vice president of environmental responsibility at the Lego Group, said. “This is a great first step in our ambitious commitment of making all Lego bricks using sustainable materials.”
The greener green Lego elements are being made from polyethylene, a plastic that is both soft and durable. Lego purists need not worry about a difference in quality or feel, as the Danish toy maker says that the new pieces are “technically identical to those produced using conventional plastic.” The plant-based plastic has been tested to meet Lego’s standards for safety.
“Lego products have always been about providing high-quality play experiences, giving every child the chance to shape their own world through inventive play. Children and parents will not notice any difference in the quality or appearance of the new elements, because plant-based polyethylene has the same properties as conventional polyethylene,” Brooks said.
The Lego Group partnered with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the Bioplastic Feedstock Alliance (BFA) to support sustainably and responsibly sourced plastic and raw material for the bioplastics industry. Lego’s new plant-based plastic is certified by the Bonsucro Chain of Custody for responsibly sourced sugarcane.
Polyethylene elements will amount to 1 to 2 percent of the total plastic used by Lego. For the most part, other pieces will still be made of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), an oil-based plastic.
Lego has committed to using sustainable materials in “core products and packaging” by 2030. It is aiming for zero waste in the company’s operations, and will introduce sustainable paper pulp trays for the Lego advent calendar sets, which will reduce the amount of plastic waste going to landfills.
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.