There is water on Mars, and it’s easily accessible. Pack your bags, friends, because we’re headed to a new planet.
Not really, of course, but the discovery does suggest that future missions to the Red Planet would be able to attain drinking water and make rocket fuel, both of which would be crucial to their success. The discovery was made using NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and involves “eight sites where thick deposits of ice beneath Mars’ surface are exposed in faces of eroding slopes,” according to a NASA news release.
The ice deposits could help scientists glean more information about underground ice sheets in the middle latitudes of Mars, which had previously gone undetected. Researchers believe that the ice initially took the form of snow many, many years ago. Now, however, it remains as “relatively pure water ice” though it is “capped by a layer one to two yards thick of ice-cemented rock and dust.”
The findings were reported this week in the journal Science. The study’s lead author, Colin Dundas of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Astrogeology Science Center, noted, “There is shallow ground ice under roughly a third of the Martian surface, which records the recent history of Mars. What we’ve seen here are cross-sections through the ice that give us a 3-D view with more detail than ever before.”
And not only are we seeing the ice in more detail, but we’re also seeing just how available it would be to both robotic and manned missions. “Astronauts could essentially just go there with a bucket and a shovel and get all the water they need,” said Shane Byrne of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, the report’s co-author.
But aside from its importance as a resource, the ice also provides scientists with clues about long-term climate patterns on Mars. “If you had a mission at one of these sites, sampling the layers going down the scarp, you could get a detailed climate history of Mars,” said MRO Deputy Project Scientist Leslie Tamppari of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. “It’s part of the whole story of what happens to water on Mars over time: Where does it go? When does ice accumulate? When does it recede?”
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.