Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

When high school students in the West Hartford Public Schools district study World War II in the coming year, they will learn about more than just the typical hallmarks like Japanese American detention camps. They will also hear about Sadao Munemori, a soldier who died protecting comrades from a grenade. The 22-year-old posthumously became the first Japanese American awarded the Medal of Honor.Lessons like this that delve beyond places have left teachers “humbled,” said Jessica Blitzer, the district’s social studies department supervisor who helped design curriculum for secondary grade levels.“It’s one of those moments where you think ‘How have we…

A Michigan man died of rabies after receiving a kidney transplant from another man who was infected by the disease when a skunk scratched him, federal health officials said in a new report.The Michigan patient died in January after getting a kidney transplant from an Idaho donor in December 2024, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released last week. Postmortem testing confirmed that the patient had contracted rabies, but the CDC said interviews with his family revealed that he did not have any exposure to animals.”(The) diagnosis of rabies in a kidney transplant recipient with no…

It’s likely just a matter of time before we see the wisened duo of Rafiki and Jiminy Cricket weilding lightsabers on the icy plains of Arendelle.That’s courtesy of artificial intelligence, of course, and a new deal between Disney and OpenAI.OpenAI said Thursday it had struck a licensing agreement to use Disney’s characters and other intellectual property. Disney will also invest $1 billion in OpenAI and will purchase ChatGPT Enterprise for its employees.It’s a major shift for Disney, which has historically been deeply protective of its intellectual property. And it’s a big win for OpenAI, which is on a quest for…

China will soon start collecting a value-added tax on contraceptive drugs and products for the first time in over three decades, a move aligned with Beijing’s effort to get families to have more children after decades of limiting most to one child.“Contraceptive drugs and products” will not be tax-exempt as of Jan. 1, according to the country’s newest value-added tax law. Products such as condoms will be subject to the usual 13% value-added tax imposed on most products.While state-run news outlets have not widely highlighted the change, it has been trending on Chinese social media, drawing ridicule among people who…

An in-home headset that allows people with depression to send mild electrical current to their brains has been cleared by the Food and Drug Administration, in what medical experts consider a milestone for expanding mental health treatment beyond drugs.The prescription device, made by Flow Neuroscience, is designed to counteract moderate to severe depression in adults by delivering electric stimulation to an area of the brain that controls mood and stress. While such stimulation is widely used to treat depression, Flow is aiming to fill a niche with a product that delivers a relatively low dose of current at home, instead…

Google released on Thursday a “reimagined” version of its research agent Gemini Deep Research based on its much-ballyhooed state-of-the-art foundation model, Gemini 3 Pro.   This new agent isn’t just designed to produce research reports — although it can still do that. It now allows developers to embed Google’s SATA-model research capabilities into their own apps. That capability is made possible through Google’s new Interactions API, which is designed to give devs more control in the coming agentic AI era.  The new Gemini Deep Research tool is an agent equipped to synthesize mountains of information and handle a large context dump…

WASHINGTON (AP) — A bipartisan group in Congress is urging the Education Department to add nursing to a list of college programs that are considered “professional,” adding to public outcry after nurses were omitted from a new agency definition.The Trump administration’s list of professional programs includes medicine, law and theology but leaves out nursing and some other fields that industry groups had asked to be included. The “professional” label would allow students to borrow larger amounts of federal loans to pursue graduate degrees in those fields.Under new rules proposed by the Trump administration, students in graduate programs deemed professional could…

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday that limits states’ ability to regulate AI individually.In the 2025 legislative session, more than 1,000 AI-related bills were proposed across all 50 states. The executive order signed by Trump aims at establishing a federal framework for regulating AI, rather than requiring tech companies to comply with various state laws.”It’s a massive industry. We’re leading China. We’re leading everybody by a tremendous amount,” Trump said during the signing. “But one of the things that it has is you have to have a central source of approval. When they need approvals on things,…

When Chase Johnson was 31, her dog began acting strange. He was anxious, wouldn’t leave her side and, one day, pushed his nose into the side of her breast. Johnson felt a hard lump.“I wasn’t someone who was good at doing self-exams, I don’t think I would have found it otherwise,” Johnson, now 36, of Cary, North Carolina, said. “I had no family history of breast cancer.”Johnson was diagnosed in February 2021 with triple-negative breast cancer, an aggressive type of the disease that tends to grow quickly and spread to other parts of the body.Breast cancer treatment is determined in…

The heirs of an 83-year-old Connecticut woman are suing ChatGPT maker OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft for wrongful death, alleging that the artificial intelligence chatbot intensified her son’s “paranoid delusions” and helped direct them at his mother before he died by suicide.Police said Stein-Erik Soelberg, 56, a former tech industry worker, fatally beat and strangled his mother, Suzanne Adams, and killed himself in early August at the home where they both lived in Greenwich, Connecticut.Adams’s death was ruled homicide “caused by blunt injury of head, and the neck was compressed” and Soelberg’s death was classified as suicide with sharp…