I’ve been dead-set on taking Acton’s RocketSkates for a test drive ever since I laid eyes on them. And at this year’s CES I finally got my chance.
Unfortunately, they weren’t as easy to ride as I had anticipated. Maybe it’s because I never had a pair of Heelys, maybe it’s because I’m more accustomed to boards than skates, but despite my best efforts, I just couldn’t get the hang of it. (To be fair, I only spent about five minutes trying.)
I wasn’t alone. I passed by the Acton booth a half dozen times while wandering around the show floor at CES, and just about every person who had RocketSkates strapped on their feet looked like a newborn giraffe. There’s definitely a bit of a learning curve.
That said, there were a couple people that figured it out within a minute or two, so it’s certainly not impossible. They take some getting used to, but just like Heelys, it seems that even the most uncoordinated person can figure it out with a few hours of practice.
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.