You may soon be able to travel from London to New York in just three hours on a supersonic passenger jet capable of speeds up to 1,354 miles per hour. A prototype for the Spike Aerospace S-512 just completed its first unmanned test flight, and commercial versions may be able to take to the skies as early as 2021.
The company said the maiden voyage was “a huge success,” according to the Daily Star. “The SX-1.2 test flights were conducted in a real world situation, and provide significantly more data than wind tunnel tests done in an artificial environment,” said CEO Vik Kachoria. “We were able to test not only handling, but also a range of other considerations.”
Spike didn’t provide any pictures or video of the exercises, but said seven short flights were conducted to test the overall design and flight controls of the aircraft. The tests were performed at a private airfield in New England.
The S-512 Quiet Supersonic Jet seats 18-22 passengers with a range of 6,200 miles and a cruising speed of Mach 1.6. “The new delta wing of the S-512 delivers high aerodynamic efficiency and improved flight performance in both low-speed flight and supersonic cruise,” said Senior Engineer Dr. Anutosh Moitra. “The highly swept leading-edge reduces wave drag and consequently reduces fuel burn and increases range.”
The aircraft also has no horizontal tail, which reduces the drag and weight on the plane in flight. Nor are there windows in the plane; passengers can watch live video from outside on thin display screens embedded into the cabin walls to create a panoramic image, or even opt to watch movies or share family photos.
All this cool stuff doesn’t come cheap, however. Each jet will run between $60 and $80 million.
The Concorde jetliners, only 20 of which were ever built, ruled the skies in the ‘70s but were discontinued in 2003 following numerous safety concerns and a 2000 crash in Paris that killed 109 people.
But now several companies are developing supersonic passenger vehicles for the 21st century. A startup called Boom wants to build a quiet jet with no supersonic boom. NASA has partnered with Lockheed-Martin for a new X-plane jet airliner. Elon Musk wants to basically launch people into space and land them on the other side of the globe in less than an hour.
International travel is poised to take a big leap forward in the next few years, so buckle your seatbelt and go along for the ride.
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.