Artist Trevor Paglen plans to launch “the first satellite to exist purely as an artistic gesture” into low-Earth orbit in 2018. The cosmic creation, called the Orbital Reflector, has no mission at all other than for people to look at it. It’s partially sponsored by the Nevada Museum of Art and will be visible from the surface of the Earth. “This is making a piece of abstract art on a rocket. By doing that you encourage people to look at it and think about the heavens,” Paglen told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Paglen is a geographer and artist who was awarded a 2017 MacArthur Foundation fellowship (a “genius grant”) and will have an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution next year. As he notes on his Kickstarter page for the project, “the Orbital Reflector is a satellite that will have no commercial, military, or scientific purpose. Instead, it will be a public sculpture, visible from the ground without a telescope — a satellite that belongs to everyone.”
The sculpture is created with thin, light, Mylar-like sheets, and it will be sent 350 miles into the heavens on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket aboard a small satellite known as a CubeSat. It’s tentatively scheduled for launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base next spring. Once deployed, the Orbital Reflector will inflate and circle the globe once every three hours until it dies a fiery death upon reentry into the atmosphere in approximately two months.
The balloon will reflect light back to Earth, making it visible with the naked eye. Paglen plans to partner with the sky-watching app Star Walk 2 to let observers know when it will be visible in their location. You’ll also be able to track the satellite as it passes overhead from their website at orbitalreflector.com.
The normally staid and analytical scientists working on the project are excited to participate in something so inspirational. “It’s different than anything I’ve ever worked on,” said aerospace engineer Mark Caviezel. “Being artistic, it’s a lot cooler than a lot of satellites, and it’s refreshing that in our uptight kind of way, we can sort of let our hair down on this.”
Paglen’s earlier space project was “The Last Pictures,” a collection of images from Earth launched into orbit in 2012. He said his inspiration for this latest endeavor goes back to Echo 1 and 2, NASA’s earliest communication satellites from the early 1960s launched in response to Sputnik. He hopes the Orbital Reflector causes people to gaze up to the heavens and consider their place in the universe.
“We humans have always looked to the sky as a sounding board for asking big questions about ourselves: Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going?”
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.