Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
Being an expert birdwatcher is more than a hobby. It’s a pastime that may alter the structure and function of your brain. And these changes may enhance cognition even as you age, new research suggests.In a Canadian study of 58 adults, the brains of expert birders, compared with those of novices, were more dense in areas related to attention and perception. Such tissue density may indicate increased communication between neurons, and these structural differences were associated with more accurate bird identification.The findings were published Monday in JNeurosci, the Journal of Neuroscience.“Our brains are very malleable,” said lead author Erik Wing,…
Sam Altman is pushing back on the idea that ChatGPT consumes too much energy.”One of the things that is always unfair in this comparison is people talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model relative to how much it costs a human to do one inference query,” Altman told The Indian Express last week on the sidelines of a major AI summit. “But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human.”Altman suggested it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, arguing that it’s unfair to discount the years spent nurturing and educating someone to be capable…
The challenge of wrangling a deep learning model is often understanding why it does what it does: Whether it’s xAI’s repeated struggle sessions to fine-tune Grok’s odd politics, ChatGPT’s struggles with sycophancy, or run-of-the-mill hallucinations, plumbing through a neural network with billions of parameters isn’t easy. Guide Labs, a San Francisco start-up founded by CEO Julius Adebayo and chief science officer Aya Abdelsalam Ismail, is offering an answer to that problem today. On Monday, the company open-sourced an 8 billion parameter LLM, Steerling-8B, trained with a new architecture designed to make its actions easily interpretable: Every token produced by the…
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Education Department is handing over more of its programs and grants to other federal agencies, announcing a pair of new agreements Monday that move the Trump administration closer to its goal of shutting down the department. Under one interagency agreement, the Health and Human Services Department will take over grant programs that send millions of dollars to schools for safety and community engagement efforts. Another calls for the State Department to take over a portal that tracks foreign gifts to universities.“As we continue to break up the federal education bureaucracy and return education to the states,…
An AI news app called Particle, from former Twitter engineers, can now keep up with news breaking on podcasts as well as news published on the web. Just ahead of its recent Android release, Particle has introduced a feature called Podcast Clips, which finds the most interesting and relevant moments across many different types of podcasts, and then includes those clips alongside the related news stories in its feed. So instead of listening to a lengthy podcast just to catch the 45 seconds of interesting comments, you can play back the clip as you’re reading the news on Particle. You…
After initially testing its AI-powered “Prompted Playlist” feature in New Zealand and recently launching in the U.S. and Canada, Spotify announced on Monday that it’s rolling out the tool to Premium subscribers in the U.K., Ireland, Australia, and Sweden. The Prompted Playlist feature allows users to create custom playlists by simply describing what they want to listen to in their own words. Instead of searching for individual songs or artists, users can describe the vibe, scenario, or inspiration they want, and Spotify will take care of the rest. To access the feature, users tap “Create” and then select “Prompted Playlist,”…
By Nancy LapidFeb 23 (Reuters) – Use of hepatitis B vaccines in U.S. newborns was declining well before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scrapped a longstanding broad recommendation for the shots in December, researchers said on Monday.Between 2023 and 2025, rates of hepatitis B vaccination within 30 days after birth dropped more than 10 percentage points, they reported in JAMA.Until then, use of the shots in newborns had been climbing for decades as the U.S. government backed the first shot shortly after birth. Under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the CDC dropped the recommendation unless the mother…
WASHINGTON, Feb 23 (Reuters) – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration proposed on Monday a new framework to speed approvals of personalized treatments for rare and life-threatening genetic diseases, allowing drugmakers to rely on small, well-controlled studies when traditional trials are not possible.The plan aims to update approval standards for individualized genetic medicines, creating a pathway for therapies aimed at patient groups too small for traditional trials.It could provide patients earlier access to treatments that would otherwise stall because only limited data can be gathered, with safety still monitored through post-approval requirements.The proposal offers drugmakers clearer rules for developing genome-editing…
A white family suing Kamehameha Schools over its Native Hawaiian admissions policy wants to stay anonymous for the duration of the case over online death threats and fears that being named publicly could affect their careers.The backlash to the lawsuit has been ferocious. The lead attorney in the case had his home address posted on social media and a package that appeared to contain feces mailed to his front door. Others have suggested that the founder of the nonprofit leading the lawsuit should be assassinated like Charlie Kirk, the right-wing political activist. The mother and daughter in the suit, referred…
We are officially down to the final 5 days to save up to $680 on your TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 ticket. These lowest rates of the year disappear on February 27 at 11:59 p.m. PT. If you’ve been mapping out your 2026 tech event calendar, this isn’t the moment to wait. Register now to lock in your savings before prices increase. What to expect at Disrupt 2026 Each year, Disrupt brings together 10,000+ founders, tech leaders, and VCs at San Francisco’s Moscone West. From October 13–15, you’ll gain valuable takeaways and curated networking opportunities designed to elevate your startup trajectory, accelerate your career, or strengthen your portfolio. Key insights from today’s tech heavyweights Last year, Disrupt featured…