Almost a year ago big-ticket audio gear maker Monster threw down Beats by Dr. Dre, a line of Dre-endorsed headphones and earbuds designed to pummel user’s hearing across a wide variety of devices and environments. Now Monster has expanded out the Beats line to include Heartbeats, a new collaboration with pop star Lady Gaga. And Monster is quick to boast that the pop diva didn’t just put her stamp of approval on a product: she helped design the earbuds so they’d look like nothing else on the market.
The in-ear Heartbeats earbuds are available in silver, red, and black chrome, and feature multiple eartips for solid fits and come with a plush travel case so, even if you aren’t comfortable on the road, you earbuds can move in style. The earbuds feature tangle-resistant flat cables from Monster, and Monster claims the earbuds offer superior audio fidelity…although they have yet to publish any specs to back up the assertion. The Dr. Dre Beats line has generally been lauded for decent performance, although few would claim they offer transparent sound reproduction.
The Heartbeats earbuds are available for pre-order now for $99.95; lady gag has also been giving away one pair per day on her official Web site…although that deal ends October 6.
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.