Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Scott ended their 25-year marriage in 2019 — and she’s become a major philanthropic force in the years since.On December 9, Scott announced that she’d donated close to $7.2 billion in the past year, bringing her total giving to more than $26 billion. Scott mentioned the 2025 total, her largest giving announcement to date, in a recent blog post on her philanthropy’s site.The donations went to colleges and a range of organizations, including ones focused on the environment, women’s rights, and economic security.As of December 2025, Scott was worth $33.8 billion, according to Forbes,…
Google is testing AI-powered article overviews on participating publications’ Google News pages as part of a new pilot program, the search giant announced on Wednesday. News publishers participating in the pilot program include Der Spiegel, El País, Folha, Infobae, Kompas, The Guardian, The Times of India, The Washington Examiner, and The Washington Post, among others. The purpose of the new commercial partnership program is to “explore how AI can drive more engaged audiences,” Google said in a blog post. As part of the new AI pilot program, the company will work with publishers to experiment with new features in Google…
ElevenLabs has made a name for itself building realistic AI voices. What started as two Polish engineers annoyed by terrible movie dubbing has grown into a profitable company now valued at $6.6 billion, doubling from just nine months ago. The company recently announced a $100 million tender offer led by Sequoia and ICONIQ, with participation from a16z and others, as its tech powers everything from Fortnite characters to customer service bots and goes toe-to-toe with OpenAI to become the default voice of AI. Today on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, we’re bringing you a conversation with CEO Mati Staniszewski from this year’s Disrupt, where…
Apple on Wednesday released its annual list of the most downloaded apps and games for the year. For the U.S. market, OpenAI’s ChatGPT topped the ranks of free iPhone apps (not including games) with the most installs in 2025. The AI app was followed by Threads, Google, TikTok, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, Google Maps, Gmail and then Google’s Gemini. ChatGPT made it to No. 4 last year, but the top spot was taken by Chinese shopping app Temu. In 2023, the AI app didn’t make the top-ten list despite being released on the iPhone in May 2023 to a strong debut.…
High levels of neighborhood violence increase the risk of Latino and African American teens in Denver starting to use alcohol and tobacco, according to our recent study.In the U.S., approximately 2 in 10 adolescents between the ages of 12 and 20 drink alcohol. About 1 in 10 smoke cigarettes. For teens living in neighborhoods with high levels of disadvantage and social disorganization, the odds are 35% to 72% higher. Disadvantaged neighborhoods generally have higher levels of economic hardship, poorer educational opportunities and limited resources. Those factors weaken the social fabric of a community.Although alcohol and tobacco use among adolescents has…
A growing share of Americans, especially in rural areas, are losing access to reproductive health care. At the same time, American women are dying during or after pregnancy at higher rates than in any other high-income country.As a result, many U.S. health care providers and policymakers are looking for ways to improve maternal care.We believe doulas – care workers who provide nonmedical support before and during pregnancy, labor, birth and the postpartum period – may be a part of the solution.We are a physician-researcher specializing in high-risk pregnancies and breastfeeding and a Ph.D. candidate in sociology focused on reproductive health…
AI agents are being sold as the solution for planning trips, answering business questions, and solving problems of all kinds, but getting them to work with tools and data outside their chat interfaces has been tricky. Developers have to patch together various connectors and keep them running, but that’s a fragile approach that’s hard to scale and creates governance headaches. Google claims it’s trying to solve that by launching its own fully managed, remote MCP servers that would make its Google and Cloud services — like Maps and BigQuery — easier for agents to plug into. The move follows the…
Heart disease has long been the top killer of women in the United States, but new research suggests uterine fibroids, which many may not even be aware they have, could be putting them at a significantly greater risk.A large, 10-year study found that women with leiomyomas had an 81% higher long-term risk of heart disease than those without the common condition. Women with fibroids — generally benign tumors that can form on or in the uterus — also had higher individual risks of cerebrovascular, coronary artery and peripheral artery diseases a decade after diagnosis.The study involved more than 2.7 million…
A new helper has arrived at the North Pole in recent years: AI. Tavus, the AI startup that creates digital replicas using voice and face cloning technology, has launched its AI Santa experience for the second year in a row. This allows parents and children to video chat with a virtual version of the jolly old Saint Nick. After signing up for a free account, users can interact with AI Santa via text, phone, or video chat. Users can tell AI Santa what they want for Christmas, share their holiday plans, and find out if they’re on the naughty or…
Design tool Figma launched new AI-powered image-editing features today, including the ability to remove and isolate objects and expand images. The company said that these features will save the hassle of exporting images to other tools for editing and importing them back. It added that generation models like Nano Banana are good for creating images, but users often need granular tools for editing that work without any text prompts. Figma has improved its lasso tool for selection. Now you can use it to select an object, remove it, or isolate it to move it around. When you move around the…