No matter how old you get, lasers will always be awesome. It’s just a rule of nature, like gravity or road rage or loving lasers. So it is our privilege — nay, our duty — to deliver to you one of the most supremely sweet home laser projects we’ve ever had the privilege to encounter: the Laser Glove MK III.
Designed by German lab technician Patrick Priebe, and based on Iron Man’s weaponry, the Laser Glove MK III truly looks like something out of science fiction. C-shaped, and worn on the hand so that the laser points directly out of the palm, the Laser Glove sports a 1000 mW 445nm laser diode, which is powerful enough to blind someone instantly. (Other than that, it lights matches, pops balloons and looks sweet.)
Powered by two lithium-ion batters that are housed on the back of the glove, the MK III runs on just 7.4 volts of electricity. According to Hack a Day, this still makes the laser “just as powerful as the WickedLasers Spyder 3 Arctic – THE benchmark in portable handheld lasers” We did find a video of the Dragon Lasers Spartan beating the Spyder 3 Arctic, so that might be the benchmark. But what do we know? In short, Priebe’s Iron Man creation is brilliantly made, at least as far as anyone can see.
Priebe has hidden most of the information about the build from the public eye, as any good mad scientist should. We do know that he was wise enough to make the innards of his MK III entirely out of 2mm-thick brass. This creative design gives Priebe’s weapon — the third iteration of the device — a massive heat sink, which absorbs the heat created by the laser, allowing it to run for an impressive three minutes straight before needing to cool down.
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.