Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Cigarette smoking among U.S. adults continues to fall to record low levels as e-cigarette use rises, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published early Thursday.Nearly 10% of adults in the U.S. smoked cigarettes in 2024, the report found. This is down from about 11% in 2023, CDC data shows.Rates of cigarette use have dramatically fallen since a landmark 1964 Surgeon General report warned about the dangers of cigarette smoking and linked it to lung cancer, chronic bronchitis and other serious diseases.As few as 2 cigarettes per day linked to 50% increased risk of…

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration has opened investigations into how race is considered in admissions at three medical schools, ratcheting up its pressure campaign against colleges and universities. The Justice Department opened the investigations Wednesday into possible discrimination at the medical schools of Stanford University, Ohio State and the University of California, San Diego. Harmeet Dhillon, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, announced the investigations on X. President Donald Trump has been ramping up scrutiny of universities he decries as overrun by liberal influence, using control of federal research funding as leverage. His administration has demanded…

OpenAI may be dialing back its efforts in the video generation market with the shutdown of its Sora app, but ByteDance on Thursday confirmed that its new audio and video model, Dreamina Seedance 2.0, is now rolling out in its editing platform, CapCut. ByteDance says the model allows creators to draft, edit, and sync video and audio content by using prompts, images, or reference videos. The phased rollout will begin with CapCut users in Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, with more markets added over time. The news of the launch in CapCut follows a recent report…

In certain corners of the internet, peptides can fix just about anything.Some popular videos claim they can help repair DNA, offer nerve relief and accelerate wound healing. Others promise shiny hair and lower stress levels. Scroll long enough, and it seems peptides are practically a cure-all. Peptide “stacks” offer customized combinations. “Biohacking” with peptides can allegedly make existing bodily functions work better. Search “peptides” on Instagram and videos of “peptide transformations” and dramatic visual before-and-afters pop up.But in reality, these types of claims are not backed by reliable data, and the formulas are not guaranteed to be safe.Here’s what to…

The surveillance tech industry today is in the spotlight, but not for the best reasons. With controversy around the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement tapping into Flock’s camera network to surveil people, and home camera maker Ring drawing criticism for building new features that would enable law enforcement to ask homeowners for footage of their neighborhoods, there’s currently a broad debate around safety, privacy, and who gets to watch whom. But controversy doesn’t erase markets, and the continued improvement of vision-language models has only blown more wind in the sails of companies building new ways to help companies monitor what…

Enterprise AI company Cohere on Thursday launched its first voice model: Transcribe is an open source automatic speech recognition model that can be used for tasks like note-taking and speech analysis. Relatively light at just 2 billion parameters, the model is meant for use with consumer-grade GPUs for those who want to self-host it. It currently supports 14 languages: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Dutch, Polish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Arabic. Cohere says Transcribe beats models such as Zoom Scribe v1, IBM Granite 4.0 1B, ElevenLabs Scribe v2, and Qwen3-ASR-1.7B Speech on the Hugging Face Open ASR…

Most people think of Alzheimer’s disease as an illness of aging. But in fact, the brain changes that characterize it begin much earlier – sometime around the third decade of life.In the earliest of these changes, a tangled version of a protein called tau starts building up in a tiny region deep in the brain involved in sleep, attention and alertness, called the locus coeruleus. Tau later spreads to the rest of the brain.Developing tau tangles doesn’t mean a person has Alzheimer’s disease – in fact, it happens to nearly everyone to varying degrees. But because these changes start in…

The Sonos Play might be the goldilocks of wireless speakers. It’s fully capable of handling music for a dinner party. It’s great for casual listening outside, too. It has a ton of connectivity options, including Bluetooth streaming. It’s not too little to pack a punch, but not too big that it can’t go most places. It’s simply a brilliant speaker, from top to bottom.That said, there’s a fine line between a do-it-all speaker and one that can be your only speaker. The Play is a perfect entry point into the Sonos ecosystem, but if you’re after maximum portability, a fully…

When 51-year-old father of two Juan Uribe shared his first ever TikTok post last month, he did so with a prayer and a plea: Doctors had recently informed him that his 15-year-old son Max, who had a rare blood disorder, would need a stem cell transplant to save his life — and he would need it soon.”Hi. My name is Juan, and I’m posting this because I need your help to save my son,” Uribe said in the Feb. 10 video.”My son has a very rare blood disorder that, if it’s not treated with a stem cell transplant in the…

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Samara Martínez has written countless letters to the illness that weakens her body.“Dear cursed one,” the Mexican activist once wrote. “I hate you because you have taken things away from me, but I love you because you have been my greatest teacher.”At 31, Martínez is among the most prominent voices pushing to decriminalize euthanasia in Mexico. The topic has long been debated by advocacy groups, politicians and academics. However, her case has shifted that conversation into the public spotlight as lawmakers weigh possible policy changes.Martínez developed early signs of chronic kidney failure at age 17. Despite…