It’s baffling just how far 3D printers have come in the last year. While wearables and 4K television sets seem to dominate the show floor at CES 2015, an abundance of 3D printers line the column-clad interior of the Venetian, carving out significant space with their plastic wears. And among them, XYZprinting has become a force to be reckoned with, touting traditional 3D printers and those catered for your kitchen.
However, its the company’s Nobel 1.0, debuting at CES 2015, that stands out among the pack. Whereas most 3D printers rely on fused filament fabrication to melt plastic and create 3D objects, the Nobel 1.0 is one of the few that uses Stereolithography Apparatus (SLA). The printing method utilizes a liquid ultraviolet-curable photopolymer — called resin — in conjunction with an ultraviolet laser to craft 3D objects, slice by slice. The laser traces a cross section of the desired object’s pattern on the liquid, which then gradually cures and hardens when exposed to the ultraviolet laser. Then, it’s simply a matter of wash, rinse, and repeat until the object is fully formed.
XYZprinting was quick to make note of a few other hallmarks aside from the 3D printer’s commendable speed, though. The pre-assembled device touts a print resolution of up to 25 microns, and moreover, can print objects ranging in size up to 5 x 5 x 7.9 inches. The increased resolution provides noticeably more detail than what most SLA 3D printers offer, too, and the sheer size of its offerings dwarfed most on the floor.
To top it off, the equipped resin-filling system also eliminates the need to constantly feed liquid resin into the machine throughout the printing process. The Nobel 1.o is also one of the cheapest SLA 3D printers on the market at $1,500, but unfortunately, you’ll have to wait until the third quarter of 2015 to get your hands on one.
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.