5G’s millimeter-wave technology can deliver incredibly fast wireless speeds, but it has an annoying weakness: those signals don’t like getting around things. Walls, furniture, people, and even moving a few feet can cause mmWave connections to weaken dramatically. Now, researchers at the University of California San Diego are proposing a surprisingly boring solution: cheap reflective tiles that simply bounce the signal where it needs to go.
mmWave sits at the higher-frequency end of wireless communications and offers much more bandwidth than conventional cellular frequencies. That’s what makes it attractive for extremely high-speed connections, but the trade-off is propagation. Signals can suffer significant path loss and are particularly vulnerable to obstructions.
As you’d expect, that creates a frustrating scenario indoors. A phone might have an excellent mmWave connection in one spot, only for the signal to fall apart after someone walks between it and the access point. Fixing that normally means adding more access points, powered relays, or sophisticated reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, all of which add cost and complexity. Thankfully, UC San Diego’s idea is considerably simpler: don’t generate another signal, just redirect the one that’s already there.
The researchers developed passive metasurfaces, essentially 3D-printed reflective tiles designed to redirect mmWave signals. The tiles don’t need batteries, power supplies, control electronics, or constant coordination. Instead, multiple inexpensive surfaces can be arranged around an environment to guide wireless signals toward areas that would otherwise be poorly covered.
The UC San Diego team calls the approach FlowForm, and its research suggests that networks of these cheap passive surfaces can rival more expensive active approaches. At roughly $2 per tile, the economics are particularly interesting: rather than installing another complicated piece of networking hardware every time a signal hits a troublesome wall, a building could potentially use a collection of almost comically simple reflectors.
Of course, this doesn’t mean every 5G tower suddenly needs to be surrounded by a wall of shiny tiles. The technology is still research, and real-world deployment would involve figuring out how many surfaces are needed, where they should be placed, and how well they perform in different environments.
But the underlying idea is compelling because it tackles one of mmWave’s biggest problems without adding another power-hungry gadget to the network. As wireless systems push toward ever-higher frequencies and faster connections, sometimes the cleverest solution isn’t another complicated chip or antenna. Sometimes, apparently, it’s a $2 piece of plastic telling a radio signal where to go.
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.