The Navy’s new Zumwalt-class guided missile destroyer is so stealthy that the military branch has decided to outfit the ship with reflectors so it will be visible to other ships. The reflectors will be standard issue for the Zumwalt and its two sister ships, allowing them to be seen on radar in situations when being visible is important.
Last month, the Navy conducted sea trials to test Zumwalt’s radar signature both with the reflective panels and without them. Following that study, the military branch has decided to issue the reflectors to the Zumwalt and its sister ships for safety reasons. The reflective panels look like metal cylinders and are already in use on other warships. They are used during operations when being seen is important, such as when the vessel must travel in busy shipping lanes or during times of dense fog.
These reflectors will be important on a ship like the Zumwalt, which has stealth technology that minimizes its radar footprint, making it appear as a much smaller ship. In a recent encounter off the coast of Maine where the vessel is being tested, lobsterman Lawrence Pye reported that the ship appeared as a 40-foot fishing boat on his radar. As the naval ship approached, the fisherman was surprised to see the 610-foot ship pass by his lobster boat. “It’s pretty mammoth when it’s that close to you,” said Pye to The Associated Press.
The Zumwalt is stealthy from the ground up, featuring an angular radar-reducing shape and a wave-piercing “tumblehome” hull that is designed to slope inward above the waterline. This design reduces the radar footprint of the vessel, especially when compared to the traditional flare hulls that become wider above the waterline. Other cutting edge technologies on the Zumwalt include a composite deckhouse, a nearly silent electric propulsion system, and an advanced gun system with 155 mm guns, long range land attack projectiles, and the possible addition of a railgun.
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.