Sorry, New York and your “Taxi of Tomorrow,” New Orleans has taken the crown for being the first American city to offer cabs equipped with vending machines. A project by the New Orleans Carriage Cab, passengers can select 99 cent options of soft drinks which will dispense from the back of their seat.
According to PSFK, the machine-equipped taxis can hold up to 36 drinks in the refrigerator hidden behind the seat. Passengers have a selection of popular soda choices like Coke, Sprite, Fanta, Nestea, and various diet options, and can make their purchase through a touchscreen menu before paying by debit or credit.
The project had reportedly been in testing for the past six months before things officially rolled out in New Orleans; The city now has 250 cabs with built-in machines, which should please drunk, thirsty, and tired passengers with the munchies. If riders are done with their drinks before the trip is over, they can also toss them out from inside the cab and the used cans will be recycled on a weekly basis.
In comparison to New York City’s “Taxi of Tomorrow” campaign, last year’s TaxiTreats concept went beyond canned drinks with its attempt to offer snack bars, over-the-counter medication, and gum. We’ve yet to see any fancy new cabs in the city, but New Orleans Carriage Cab says its modernized vehicles will soon make their way north – starting with Chicago and the Big Apple. Wonder what Mayor Bloomberg will think about offering sweet, sugary drinks in his city’s famous yellow cabs.
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.