Ever wish your eyes came with a zoom lens? Soon they might.
Scientists at the University of California San Diego have successfully created a pair of contact lenses that zoom in on something when you blink twice. Details about the creation were recently published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.
To create the lens, the scientists measured the signals that are generated when your eyes make specific movements like blinking or moving left or right and created a soft contact lens that responds to the electric impulses your eye makes when it performs those movements. That means the contact knows you’re looking to the left or blinking and can perform a function based on that movement.
The contact lenses created by the scientists will zoom in whenever a person blinks twice in a short period of time. That could be great for quickly seeing a street sign far away, but could also be an unexpected nightmare if you ended up accidentally double blinking while you’re behind the wheel of a car or doing pretty much anything else that requires your vision and quick reaction time.
While we’re not likely to see a zooming contact lens headed our way anytime soon, the study does open the door to some pretty interesting possibilities for advanced vision technology.
“The system developed in the current study has the potential to be used in visual prostheses, adjustable glasses, and remotely operated robotics in the future,” researchers suggest in the report detailing the creation. “In addition, because of the biomimetic features of the system, it can also be used as a physical model for visualizing physiological principles, which is important in biology and medicine. According to our knowledge, a soft tunable lens, whose position and focus length can be separately controlled by soft active material, has never been designed and constructed before.”
The contact lenses were made as a proof of concept rather than a commercial product and are designed to merely show what could be possible in the future rather than how the contact’s technology will ultimately be made available to the public.
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.