If you want to surf on flat water, you either need to be towed by a boat, or have a built-in motor on your board. It used to be that the latter option was impossible, but now that batteries and electric motors are smaller than ever before, surf startups all over the globe are building self-propelled boards that you can ride anywhere — not just the ocean.
The latest entry into this burgeoning category comes from Onean Electric Jet Surfboards. The company has recently unveiled a pair of boards equipped with powerful electric engines — effectively allowing you to surf without waves.
The Carver and the Manta, as they’re called, both sport onboard 4400-Watt brushless motors under your feet. The boards are sandwich style with a CNC and EPS shaped core, and while their top speed is still being tested, they look pretty damn quick in the video above. The axial water pump powered by the motor is controlled with a wireless remote. The motor is silent and, since it’s electric, both of the company’s boards are safe for use in protected areas.
With more of an elongated oval shape and a tapered nose, the Carver is made to slalom, or “carve” up the water. The top speed is still being tested, but the battery can handle about 20 minutes at full thrust. It has two foot straps to keep you safely onboard.
The Manta is a little heavier and has a square shape that makes it more stable. It’s designed for smooth cruising at lower speeds, topping out at 8 kilometers an hour. It’ll cruise for two hours before the battery dies, which makes it perfect for exploring. In either case, the battery takes about two hours to charge, so you can charge it in the morning before you head out to the water. Onean does offer extra batteries for $1,300 each.
The Blade, the third Onean board is coming soon. By looks, it appears to be a smaller, even more nimble board than the Carver. Onean hasn’t revealed any stats or prices yet.
The versatility of design Onean offers here is pretty interesting, but there are other electric jet boards available. These lack some of the more convenient features you’ll find on other boards. For instance, the Onean boards don’t deflate for easy storage and transport like Sipa or Lampuga Boards, and since one of the boards doesn’t need a paddle, the remote is an external affair (not built into the paddle) that gives you yet another thing to carry.
Propulsion makes the Onean electric jet surfboards perfect for lake surfing and calmer beaches. $3,870 gets you a Carver Pack, while the Manta runs $4,090. Both come with the respective boards, a wireless remote, battery, charger, leash, footstrap and fin set for the bottom of the board. The Manta also comes with a paddle. Orders will start shipping the last quarter of 2015.
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.