Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
Feb 17 (Reuters) – South Carolina reported a surge to 962 measles cases on Tuesday, state health data showed, including 12 additional infections since Friday, as officials warned the widening outbreak could last weeks or months amid lagging vaccine uptake.The outbreak, which began in October, has been centered in the northwest part of the state, which includes Greenville and Spartanburg, according to the South Carolina Department of Public Health.The South Carolina outbreak is part of the nation’s largest measles surge in more than three decades, federal health data show.Of those infected, 893 were unvaccinated, 20 were partially vaccinated with one…
Anthropic has released a new version of its mid-size Sonnet model, keeping pace with the company’s four-month update cycle. In a post announcing the new model, Anthropic emphasized improvements in coding, instruction-following, and computer use. Sonnet 4.6 will be the default model for Free and Pro plan users. The beta release of Sonnet 4.6 will include a context window of 1 million tokens, twice the size of the largest window previously available for Sonnet. Anthropic described the new context window as “enough to hold entire codebases, lengthy contracts, or dozens of research papers in a single request.” The release comes…
Civil rights activist and former presidential candidate Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr. died Tuesday morning at age 84.Jackson had been experiencing health issues over the last several years, including a hospital stay last year due to a rare neurological disorder.Here is a timeline of Jackson’s recent medical history:Ludovic Marin/POOL/AFP via Getty Images – PHOTO: Veteran American civil rights activist Reverend Jesse Jackson looks after being awarded with the Legion of Honour by French President at the Elysee Palace in Paris on July 19, 2021.2008In September 2008, Jackson was hospitalized at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago after complaining of severe stomach pains…
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A man has been charged with murder after taking part in a marijuana deal that ended with a shooting that killed two people and hurt another inside a dorm room at South Carolina State University, police said.Khamanti Lytrel Kennedy, 18, ran from the dorm room after the Thursday night shooting at the Hugine Suites housing complex, according to an arrest warrant filed by the State Law Enforcement Division.Kennedy, who is not a student at the university, was out on bond after a September arrest for having a gun on campus, according to court records.Henry L. Crittington,…
Mistral AI, the French company last valued at $13.8 billion, has made its first acquisition. The OpenAI competitor has agreed to buy Koyeb, a Paris-based startup that simplifies AI app deployment at scale and manages the infrastructure behind it. Mistral has been primarily known for developing large language models (LLMs), but this deal confirms its ambitions to position itself as a full-stack player. In June 2025, it had announced Mistral Compute, an AI cloud infrastructure offering which it now hopes Koyeb will accelerate. Founded in 2020 by three former employees of French cloud provider Scaleway, Koyeb aimed to help developers…
Travis Brashears, Cameron Ramos, and Serena Grown-Haeberli began collaborating at SpaceX, developing optical communications links that keep thousands of Starlink internet satellites in constant contact. Now, the three engineers are co-founders of Mesh Optical Technologies, a Los Angeles startup that announced a $50 million Series A led by Thrive Capital on Tuesday. Mesh aims to mass-produce optical transceivers, devices that convert optical signals from fiber or laser into electrical signals for computers. CEO Brashears, President Ramos, and VP of Product Grown-Haeberli realized the opportunity when designing a new generation of compute-hungry SpaceX satellites forced them to assess the optical transceiver…
When we talk about the cost of AI infrastructure, the focus is usually on Nvidia and GPUs — but memory is an increasingly important part of the picture. As hyperscalers prepare to build out billions of dollars’ worth of new data centers, the price for DRAM chips has jumped roughly 7x in the last year. At the same time, there’s a growing discipline in orchestrating all that memory to make sure the right data gets to the right agent at the right time. The companies that master it will be able to make the same queries with fewer tokens, which…
The European Parliament has reportedly blocked lawmakers from using the baked-in AI tools on their work devices, citing cybersecurity and privacy risks with uploading confidential correspondence to the cloud. Per an email seen by Politico, the parliament’s IT department said it could not guarantee the security of the data uploaded to the servers of AI companies and that the full extent of what information is shared with AI companies is “still being assessed.” As such, the email said, “It is considered safer to keep such features disabled.” Uploading data to AI chatbots, like Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft’s Copilot, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT,…
WordPress.com, the website hosting platform from Automattic, will now include a built-in WordPress AI assistant, the company announced on Tuesday. The feature is designed to work inside the website to understand its content and layout, allowing site owners to make changes with natural language commands. With the new tool, you can adjust the site’s layout, its style, or other patterns by issuing commands to the AI assistant. You’ll then see the changes reflected on the site as you work. These instructions don’t have to be precisely tailored prompts, either, the company notes. Instead, you can use more general language, like…
The challenges facing students at Kalihi Waena Elementary School in Kalihi are significant: nearly 75% of students come from low-income households, more than a third are English language learners, and 41% of students were performing below grade level last year. Yet inside the century-old campus, Principal Daniel Larkin says students are resilient, eager to learn, and capable of remarkable growth. He smiles as he recalls a former English language learner who, despite coming from a family with limited schooling and a different country, went on to graduate from Stanford.Helping students at Kalihi Waena build self-esteem and literacy skills is the…