Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — When a male bullfinch smashed into Marcin Jarzębski’s apartment window, he took it in but realized it needed expert treatment. So the next morning he brought it to Warsaw’s new emergency room for wild birds.He placed the tiny, plump bird with a black head, gray back and reddish chest feathers into a shoebox and took it as one of the first patients to the new drop-off center for sick and injured birds at the entrance of the Warsaw Zoo.“The bird stayed with us overnight, but unfortunately it probably has a broken wing so we brought it…

LONDON (AP) — A meningitis outbreak in southeast England has led to the deaths of a university student and a pupil from a nearby school, prompting public health officials to quickly roll out medical interventions.The outbreak in the county of Kent was described Wednesday as unprecedented by U.K. Health Secretary Wes Streeting, owing to the high number of cases appearing in such a short space of time. The first case was only confirmed on Friday.The number of meningitis cases rose by a further five on Tuesday to 20. Thousands of students at the University of Kent in the city of…

Americans are furious about drug prices. The Trump administration’s answer? A new website.But more than a month after its launch, the site, TrumpRx.gov, remains small — offering discounts on just 54 prescription drugs. Many of those drugs already have cheaper generic versions or savings programs available elsewhere, and the discounts can’t be used with insurance or count toward a deductible. Awareness of the site remains limited.Whether TrumpRx actually lowers drug prices matters in ways that go beyond the success of the website itself. For President Donald Trump, it’s tied to a broader push on health care costs as the midterms…

Stock-based compensation, long a defining feature of the software industry, faces renewed scrutiny as investors reassess the sector amid slowing growth and the disruptive impact of AI.The issue came into focus during a recent conversation I had with the CEO of a major public software company, who warned that the industry could be headed for a “painful financial reset.”Speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the topic, the executive said stock-based compensation, or SBC, has grown too large relative to future growth prospects for many software-as-a-service companies.Recent data from analysts at Barclays and William Blair highlights how widespread the issue…

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s remarks at the company’s GTC conference had a recurring theme: AI tokens.In a conversation with analysts on Tuesday, Huang framed future computers as “manufacturing equipment” that will produce tokens. He said that tokens will become a core line item in corporate budgets, like laptops or software subscriptions.With all this talk about tokens, what exactly are they?Tokens are units of text — a word or a part of a word — that determine how AI work is measured and priced. A short word could be a single token, while longer words can be split into several. A…

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — It started with a casual lunch conversation between a county governor and his cabinet ministers about a colleague’s menstrual pain. The discussion led to a first in Kenya: The right for female employees to take menstrual leave.The new policy took effect in December 2025. It grants county government employees in the capital, Nairobi, two days off every month to deal with the pain and discomfort of menstruation, with the aim of improving productivity and well-being.Governor Johnson Sakaja told The Associated Press that Kenya’s national government has expressed interest in how it goes, and other county governors…

A group of nearly 150 retired judges has joined the list of Anthropic’s supporters in its fight with the Pentagon.In a brief filed on Tuesday, 149 retired federal and state judges said the Department of War’s labeling of the AI company as a “supply chain risk” was unfounded. Anthropic is the creator of the Claude LLM.The judges wrote that the department “misinterpreted the statute and ignored the necessary procedures,” and they were duty-bound to call the label unlawful.”More fundamentally, as a practical matter, no one is trying to force the Department to contract with Anthropic,” the judges wrote. “To the…

Eating a diet rich in leafy greens, berries, and fish may help keep the brain younger for longer, with this eating pattern linked to slower shrinkage in key brain areas tied to memory and thinking, according to a new study published Tuesday in BMJ Neurology.The study, which tracked brain changes in more than 1,600 adult participants in the Framingham Heart Study Offspring Cohort, or group, over about 12 years, found that people who closely followed the MIND diet — an acronym for Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay, an eating pattern designed to protect brain health by emphasizing foods like leafy…

Most enterprise AI projects fail not because companies lack the technology, but because the models they’re using don’t understand their business. The models are often trained on the internet, rather than decades of internal documents, workflows, and institutional knowledge.  That gap is where Mistral, the French AI startup, sees opportunity. On Tuesday, the company announced Mistral Forge, a platform that lets enterprises build custom models trained on their own data. Mistral announced the platform at Nvidia GTC, Nvidia’s annual technology conference, which this year is focused heavily on AI and agentic models for enterprise. It’s a pointed move for Mistral, a…

Y Combinator’s famed CEO Garry Tan told a SXSW audience that he’s got “cyber psychosis” and is barely sleeping because he’s so excited to be working with AI agents. “I sleep, like, four hours a night right now,” he told his interviewer, fellow VC Bill Gurley, during an onstage interview Saturday. “I have cyber psychosis, but I think a third of the CEOs that I know have it as well,” he joked about his current AI obsession. (At least, we hope he was joking. AI-induced psychosis can actually be a dangerous condition.) “Once you try it, you’ll realize: It’s like…