Getting to space is hard. Really hard, in fact. There’s just not a lot of room for error. For every space flight that’s ever gone smoothly, there are dozens of botched missions that remind us how fine the line is between success and failure. To make things worse, when things do go wrong with a rocket launch, it usually doesn’t end pretty. Catastrophic crashes and violet explosions are common, and unfortunately so is the loss of lives. We’ve combed through space flight history and found some of the most massive rocket crashes ever caught on film.
Interstellar Technologies is Japan’s version of SpaceX. It is the first private company to launch a rocket in Japan and hopes to become the first Japanese company to launch a rocket into space. The company’s first two launches haven’t fared so well The first suborbital rocket, the MOMO-1, failed 66 seconds after launch, while the second rocket, the MOMO-2, crashed violently four-seconds after launch. Despite these setbacks, the company is earnestly working on the future MOMO-3and a new orbital rocket.
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.