Earlier this week, at the Human to Mars Summit in Washington DC, NASA unveiled the juicy the details of the agency’s plan to finally send humans to Mars — and according to official statements, that plan apparently involves sending astronauts to the moon for a full year to prepare.
This will happen in two phases. The first phase includes launching four manned vehicles to cislunar space — an orbit between the Moon and Earth — to transport building materials, a research module, a power source and an airlock, according to Space.com. Each of these missions will occur between 2018 and 2026 with the second phase set for 2027.
Then NASA will launch the Deep Space Transport (DST) vehicle to cislunar space. This will be followed by a crew who will live in this lunar habitat for one year. The leap to Mars — currently slated for the 2030s — will launch the DST using the planned Space Launch System (SLS).
This tight timeline is wholly dependent on the completion of the SLS which is already three years behind schedule with the first launch currently slatted for 2019. If the rocketry is delayed yet again NASA may have to extend this ambitious timeline or partner with the private sector currently building other heavy rocket models such as SpaceX’s promising Falcon Heavy vehicle.
With a rather lofty schedule already loosely set and banking on a roughly trillion dollar price tag over the course of 25 years, this extensive mission timeline has a lot of loose ends and budget constraints to tidy up. Buzz Aldrin recently even proposed giving the private sector the keys to the ISS to free up more money for this preliminary mission to Mars.
To paraphrase the late, great Notorious B.I.G., it looks like we’re “going going, back back to”… the Moon.
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.