A new gel made from algae may revolutionize the way we heal. The amazing new material can halt the blood flow in seconds on woulds that would normally take much longer to staunch.
The new product, called Vetigel, is applied to the bleeding site with a syringe and enhances the body’s own clotting fibers, collecting platelets and stopping the blood flow. It holds over time (as opposed to breaking down and letting the wound bleed again), and works equally well for both skin and organs.
Vetigel is made from plant cell polymers that collect fibrin, a protein required for blood clotting. Since the gel is plant based, it can be safely reabsorbed by the body as the wound heals. Check out the TED Talks vid below.
There are other products out there focused on hemostasis (stopping bleeding), like Xstat, and QuickClot. The former is little more than a bunch of tiny sponges, and the latter works by soaking up the body’s own water and concentrating coagulants. They can take a little longer to work than Vetigel, and need pressure applied to the wound to slow blood flow.
Because it’s so much faster and more effective, the gel could be a boon for emergency medicine. No more extreme bleeds, and no more need to keep pressure on the wound – just squirt some into the affected area and watch the blood leak stop right before your eyes.
Unfortunately, right now it’s only approved for use in animals. Human trials have yet to get the green light, but the first shipments of Vetigel are scheduled to go out to veterinarians in November. Inventor Joe Landolina (who invented the gel when he was 17) says he expects to get approval for human use in the next two to three years.
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.