Following 12 recent deaths and hundreds of illnesses that are being blamed on vaping, Washington State Gov. Jay Inslee is seeking to impose an emergency ban on flavored e-cigarette products. The state would join Michigan and New York in banning flavored products, while Massachusetts has halted all sales of e-cigarettes for four months.
The Washington ban includes products that contain THC. “If I had a loved one, I would just tell them you’re playing dice with your lungs,” Inslee said, according to the Seattle Times.
Because the Washington State Board of Health doesn’t meet until October 9, Inslee’s executive order won’t go into effect until the board uses its emergency power to enact the ban.
The Centers for Disease Control is investigating the causes of the lung injuries, and it said Friday that most of them have been linked to THC capsules. The deaths have occurred in 10 states, while 804 cases of vaping-related lung illnesses have been reported in 46 states and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
“Based on this recent data, the CDC recommends people consider refraining from use of e-cigarette or vaping products, particularly those containing THC,” the agency said Friday.
The CDC still isn’t sure exactly what is causing the outbreak. Part of the difficulty is patients who’ve been diagnosed with the lung problems report using a variety of products and substances, making it difficult to narrow down the culprit, if it is only a single one.
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump held a press conference about the recent outbreak of illnesses, and his administration has proposed a nationwide ban of flavored e-cigarettes.
“Not only is it a problem overall, but really, specifically, with respect for children,” he said. “We may very well have to do something very, very strong about it.”
On September 25, Kevin Burns stepped down as CEO of Juul Labs. The popular e-cigarette company — the single biggest e-cigarette manufacturer in the country — announced that it was suspending all print, broadcast, and digital advertising in the U.S. amid the lung injuries and concerns about teen vaping.
Federal authorities have also announced a criminal investigation against Juul. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are also investigating, An FTC probe is looking into whether Juul’s marketing targeted minors.
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.