“When I went to grab something, I could feel myself grabbing it. When I thought about moving this or that finger, it would move almost right away,” Keven Walgamott said. “I don’t know how to describe it except that it was like I had a hand again.”
Walgamott was describing the results of an experimental surgery to The Washington Post, where a prosthetic known as the “Luke” arm had been attached with electrodes implanted into his nerves. The real estate agent had lost his hand and most of his arm in an electrical accident 14 years ago, and he volunteered for the program at the University of Utah.
The fingers and hand of the neuroprosthetic device can be controlled by his own nerve impulses. Researchers even worked to restore the sense of touch, allowing him to pick up and manipulate objects.
Researchers dubbed it the “Luke” arm, after the legendary Jedi of Star Wars fame. It was developed by Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, with additional funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Scientist discovered that adding touch to robotic hands improves motor skills and reduces the feeling of “phantom pain,” an unpleasant experience many amputees grapple with. “By adding sensory feedback, it becomes a closed-loop system that mimics biology,” said Jacob George or the University of Utah.
A device known as the Utah Slanted Electrode Array was implanted directly into the nerves in Walgamott’s upper arm. In conjunction with the with electrodes implanted in his muscles, the USEA let him easily control his robotic hand just as if he was making a fist or picking up an object. It took several years to incorporate sensations into the “Luke” arm, by mapping out spots on the hand that correspond with which various nerve fibers in the arm.
Walgamott is delighted with the new arm and the things he can do with it, such as picking up a grape without crushing it or holding his wife’s hand. But his greatest joy is being able to do one of those mundane things that we all take for granted — putting a pillow in a pillowcase.
“When you have just one hand, you learn to adapt,” he said. “To just take a pillow in one hand and put the pillowcase on with the other. I know it sounds simple, but it’s amazing.”
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.