3D printers seem to get bigger and badder with each passing week, but this is just ridiculous. Earlier this week, the 3D printing gurus at WASP (World’s Advanced Saving Project) announced plans to officially unveil a 40 foot tall 3D printer on Friday. Once erected, the massive “Big Delta” will supposedly be the largest 3D printer in the world.
While a 3D printer of this size is sure to make even Donald Trump salivate at the prospect of what it can build, the team behind it says the main goal is to use the Big Delta to build extremely low-cost housing. To do this, WASP outfitted the printer to use local materials such as dirt or clay, and built it to function using less than 100 watts of power. With a strong, 20-foot-wide metal body and a printing nozzle which doubles as a materials mixer, WASP’s latest endeavor is an absolute mammoth. Considering these characteristics, Big Delta appears especially valuable in providing quick relief to areas hit by devastating natural disasters.
Even with its inherent usefulness in times of crisis, WASP says there’s growing interest to use the Big Delta to build inexpensive housing units in population-heavy territories. In a press release posted to the company’s website, it states that the United Nations calculates an average daily requirement of an astounding 100,000 new homes over the next 15 years to shelter the world’s growing population. WASP’s own estimates say that by 2030, roughly 4 billion people will need “adequate housing requirements” while living off of an annual income of just $3,000. Using Big Delta — and other 3D printers like it — it hopes to provide an immediate remedy to this growing problem.
WASP plans to unveil this revolutionary printer this weekend during a three-day rally it’s dubbing “Reality of dream,” in Rieti, Italy. During the rally, the company will share its progress on the technology and sustainability of a project like Big Delta, and also intends to show off the printer with a theatrical performance. While we aren’t entirely sure just how good its acting chops are, we can’t wait to see the kind of good Big Delta does once WASP unleashes it on the world.
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.