This is either going to be the worst or the best thing you’ve done seen today. MonkeyLectric, the company behind those LED lights you can attach to inside your bike’s spokes to make them look cool at night, has launched a Kickstarter campaign so you can get the system to display animated GIFs. That’s GIFs – hard G, soft G, whatever you prefer – on your bikes, also known as in real life. Again, it’s either going to be amazing or totally obnoxious.
On the awesome front? Until now, the Monkey Lights system comes with preloaded graphics so you can zoom through the night while displaying LED images of space invaders, hearts, or words. With the new Monkey Lights Pro, you can upload custom animated graphics to truly personalize your bikes. Supported files include JPG, GIF, PNG, AVI, MPEG, MOV, QT, and FLV so you literally play any clip you want while you ride as long as it does not exceed 1,000 image frames per clip.
The system will also recognize acceleration speeds to emit pre-determined graphics, like Fast Forward symbol for quick rides, Play symbol for regular cruises, and Stop symbol for breaks. The wheels can show off graphics in full color, utilizing 256 bright LED shades, and can run for up to eight hours in one charge. If you run them with minimal brightness, the battery life extends up to 48 hours. For each wheel, the setup comes with two-axis accelerometer and four magnetic sensors to track the rotation. This all ensures the images display clearly and does not sputter as the rider changes speed or ride backward.
So how is it going to be terrible? Well, let’s face it, the GIF era has hit its peak. You can only see so many Nyan Cats on the Internet on any given day, but now you may have to see them roaming the city on hipster bikes? The Web and reality need to stop blurring their territorial lines.
If you’re one of those who are interested in the Monkey Lights Pro, just promise not to be annoying with them and it’s all good. The system will retail for $895 per wheel ($1,690 for a set), but if you back the project before July 21, there are still a couple of early bird pricing pledges left. Monkey Lights Pro is expected to ship by December of this year.
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.