The annual Perseid meteor shower reached its peak last week, putting on a fantastic show for stargazers watching the late night skies. To honor the “Lágrimas de San Lorenzo” (Saint Lorenzo’s tears) astronomical event, four wingsuit jumpers from around the world joined together with Red Bull to create a light show of their own.
The team of four skydivers, which included Norwegian Joacim Sommer, Spaniard Armando del Rey, and Austrians Marco Waltenspiel and Georg Lettner, traveled to the Spanish island of La Palma in the Canary Islands. La Palma is best known for the Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory, which is home to the world’s largest optic telescope and the background setting for the jump. The quartet loaded up their gear and climbed aboard a T-21 provided with support from the Air Force, the Canarian Astrophysics Institute and La Palma’s City Hall.
Once they arrived at jump elevation, the four skydivers lit up their LED-equipped wingsuits and prepared for an unbelievable nighttime flight in complete and utter darkness. “I was in this black tunnel and there was nothing else besides all those billions of stars in my face. It was a really unique visual because you could really feel the speed, but you have no other surroundings,” Sommer said in a statement. “You are just in pitch black; it is like you are out there in the outer space. It’s crazy, it was literally crazy.”
After exiting the plane at 1,800 meters, the team streaked across the sky at an eye-watering 170 kilometers per hour, creating a meteor shower of epic human proportion. A GoPro recorded a bird’s eye view of the stun, while photographers on the ground used long-exposure photography to capture the jumpers as they lighted up the sky. To cap off the event, the four paid tribute to firefighters who recently battled a forest fire in La Palma that burned almost 10,000 acres and required the evacuation of more than 3,000 residents.
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.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.