To the moon! To Sochi! To … Talladega Superspeedway?
Last week, the a few members of the notoriously philanthropic community behind the meme-inspired cryptocurrency Dogecoin noticed that NASCAR racer Josh Wise was without a sponsor. So, being the charitable guys they are, they took to reddit to rally the rest of the Dogecoin community and raise the $55,000 needed to cover his car. A funding page was set up to accept donations, and with the help of over 1,200 contributors (one of whom accidentally donated $15,000), the group has reached it’s goal roughly a week after the funding campaign began. It’s official, folks – we’re going to see a Doge car race around Talladega next month.
On May 4, at the Aaron’s 499 at Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama, Wise’s no. 98 Ford will take to the track adorned in all manner of silly internet meme decals. We don’t know what the official sponsor wrap will look like just yet, but a few photoshop-savvy redditors have already taken the liberty of creating a few mockups, and there’s currently a design competition underway to decide the final look.
And this isn’t the first fundraising spearheaded by the Dogecoin community either. Previously, donations raised by the community have sent the Jamaican bobsled team to Sochi, raised money to supply needy families with service animals and even gathered $30,000 to help supply clean water to Kenya.
Could online communities and cryptocurrency donations be the future of athletic sponsorship? Tell us what you think in the comments.
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.