Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
Between Halloween candy, Thanksgiving pies and holiday cookies, the end of the year is often packed with opportunities to consume sugar. But what happens in your mouth during those first minutes and hours after eating those sweets?While you’re likely aware that eating too much sugar can cause cavities – that is, damage to your teeth – you might be less familiar with how bacteria use those sugars to build a sticky film called plaque on your teeth as soon as you take that first sweet bite.We are a team of microbiologists that studies how oral bacteria cause tooth decay. Here’s…
Twenty-one children are among 33 people who have died in Cuba of the mosquito-borne chikungunya and dengue viruses since July, authorities said Monday.Most of the deaths were attributed to chikungunya — characterized by fever and joint pain that can be debilitating but rarely fatal — while the flu-like dengue claimed 12 lives, the country’s deputy health minister Carilda Pena said on state TV.The chikungunya virus emerged in Cuba’s western Matanzas province in July, but soon spread to all 15 provinces of the country of 9.7 million people.The chikungunya virus was first identified in Africa in the early 1950s. Chikungunya’s symptoms…
KACHEHEMBE, Congo (AP) — Measles vaccines have arrived in a rebel-held area of eastern Congo nearly a year after a deadly outbreak of the highly contagious disease began.The seizure of parts of the region early this year by Rwanda-backed M23 rebels has affected the delivery of health care in one of the world’s most dire humanitarian crises, residents and aid groups have said.This week, anxious parents clutching small children have been lining up in Kachehembe in North Kivu province to receive the vaccine from medical charity Doctors Without Borders, also known as MSF.“Children are suffering greatly from this disease,” said…
Gradium, a startup spun out of French AI lab Kyutai (backed by French telecom billionaire Xavier Niel), launched out of stealth on Tuesday with a $70 million seed round from a who’s who of investors. The round was led by FirstMark Capital and Eurazeo, with participation from Niel, DST Global Partners, billionaire Eric Schmidt and other investors. Gradium has developed audio language AI models designed to deliver voice at scale with ultra-low latency — essentially, AI voices that respond almost instantly. It was founded just a few months ago, in September, 2025, by Kyutai founding member Neil Zeghidour, who cut his…
By Julie SteenhuysenCHICAGO, Dec 2 (Reuters) – An independent review released on Tuesday by vaccine experts of more than 400 studies and reports found that long-standing U.S. policy of giving the hepatitis B vaccine to newborns has cut infections in children by more than 95%.The policy, adopted in 1991, will be discussed and voted on later this week by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccine advisers hand-picked by U.S. health secretary and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.”After extensive review, we did not discover safety or effectiveness data that support delaying the choice parents have to vaccinate their newborns…
Logan Brown, a 30-year-old corporate lawyer, began the year billing hours at the global law firm Cooley. Now she’s building a tech-first law firm that meets the routine needs of startups, without the Big Law price tag.Soxton, Brown’s new venture, has raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding, Business Insider has learned exclusively.”I didn’t have a deck. I didn’t have a team,” Brown said.Instead, she told investors, “I am building the solution for founders. That is not the billable hour.”Cooley hired Brown straight out of Harvard Law School. She spent about two and a half years working with emerging companies and…
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Maitri Mangal, a 26-year-old software engineer at Google, based in New York. Her identity and employment have been verified by Business Insider. The following has been edited for length and clarity.When I started off as a software engineer, my dad, who also works in tech, kept telling me to get into AI.I brushed it off because I was just starting off my engineering career, and no one was really talking about AI in 2019, unless they were getting a PhD.Then in 2023, the tech industry changed and everyone started going into…
Bryan Johnson, the 48-year-old centimillionaire and nocturnal-erection-measuring longevity influencer, sits in the lotus position on a white loveseat, his knees grazing the knees of Kate Tolo, his 29-year-old business partner and, today, his spiritual guide through his psychedelic mushroom trip. “My body feels so nimble and supple and loose,” he says. “Everything feels youthful.”Like thousands of people watching the livestream on X, YouTube, or Instagram, I spent a portion of my Sunday watching “Bryan Johnson Takes Magic Mushrooms,” a new entry into the Thanksgiving family entertainment canon in which Johnson took 5.24 milligrams of mushrooms, a near-heroic dose, “for science.”…
I have bad news for my fellow rage baiters: We may be seeing the peak of the rage-bait bubble. I’m advising you to exit your rage-bait positions and go long on earnest posting through at least 2027.My recommendation comes as “rage bait” has been named the Oxford Word of the Year for 2025, narrowly edging out runners-up “aura farming” and “biohack.” Last year’s word was “brain rot.” (Oxford is insisting the phrases “rage bait” and “brain rot” are two separate words, which, in my opinion, is its own form of rage bait!)Rage bait, of course, is the tactic of purposely…
The US government is poised to become a shareholder in a semiconductor startup chaired by Pat Gelsinger, who ran Intel until his resignation last year.The Commerce Department said on Monday that the Trump administration signed a nonbinding letter of intent to invest up to $150 million in xLight, a startup trying to build a more advanced and cost-effective way to manufacture chips.The investment would come from the CHIPS and Science Act and would be structured as equity, giving the federal government direct ownership in the company.The deal — a first from the Trump administration’s CHIPS Research and Development Office —…