Before you click “Purchase” for tickets to the Ringling Bros. circus show, remember that there’s always YouTube to offer up free, mind blowing, black magic trickery that’s as good as live tightrope walks and well-dressed elephants standing on theirs hind legs.
Ravi Fernando gained some Internet notoriety last year when he posted YouTube videos of him solving a Rubik’s cube while juggling the puzzle with two regular balls. Now, he’s up the ante by solving three Rubik’s cubes. While juggling them. All at the same time. Oh, and he completely solves all three by the 5:55 minute mark. As if it’s not hard enough to juggle three average sacks for six continuous minutes!
Alas, Fernando, a Stanford University student, shows he’s still only human by (maybe purposely) dropping one cube after he inspects his results. He even had a fan walk up and recognize him during the act.
Keep watching and just wait for it. Eventually, the sides of the cubes will begin to bare similar shades and you’ll wonder why you went to graduate school for Human Rights when you could have just been a really bored kid at home with a few toys and a video camera. You go, Ravi, you win the Internet.
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.