Need something to keep you busy this weekend? We’ve got you covered. The Weekend Workshop is our weekly column in which we showcase a badass DIY project that you can complete with minimal skills and expertise. We’ve dug through all the online tutorials and gone the extra mile to pinpoint projects that are equal parts easy, affordable, and fun. So put on your work pants, grab your tool belt, and head to the garage. It’s time to start building!
In the late 1800s, as Thomas Edison’s light bulb was sweeping the nation, electricity as a utility was widely cherished — and for good reason. Today, it’s just one part of an abundance of modern day utilities taken for granted. Having the ability to waltz into your local Home Depot and grab a LED light bulb off a shelf would be incomprehensible just 100 years ago.
So this weekend, instead of merely purchasing one, why not try to fashion your own light bulb out of a few ordinary items? Thanks to a sharp engineer on Instructables known as sathyanc, building your own electric light bulb shouldn’t take more than an hour. Using little else in terms of materials than a glass Mason jar, eight D-cell batteries, and a graphite pencil needle, this innovative light bulb is not only easy to build, but wildly novel.
To help you get started, we’ve sifted through sathyanc’s step-by-step walkthrough to find an exact build list for the project. Thankfully, they also posted a video detailing how to put together this DIY light bulb, so if reading isn’t your thing, you’re in luck. Here’s what you’ll need to get started:
With all the necessary tools and materials at the ready, it’s now time to start piecing together this homemade electric light bulb. Simply follow sathyanc’s comprehensive walkthrough and before you know it, you’ll be the proud owner of a DIY bulb that Edison himself would envy. Happy building!
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.