Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — For two hours, Claire Jefferies wanted to get away from the war in Iran and the rising gas prices and just commune with nature. And, so, she treated herself to a little forest bathing.“When I’m here, it’s almost like a protective bubble around me,” the human resources director said amid oaks and flowering magnolias at the J.C. Raulston Arboretum in Raleigh, North Carolina. “It provides a shield.”The Sunday morning session was led by certified forest therapy guide Shawn Ramsey. Jingling a tiny brass bell, she called her dozen or so charges to gather for meditation, breathing…

Nvidia’s GTC conference had everything: trillion dollar sales projections, graphics technology that can yassify video games, grand declarations that every company needs an OpenClaw strategy, and even a robot version of the beloved snowman Olaf from Disney’s “Frozen.” On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, TechCrunch’s Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I recapped CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote and debated what it means for Nvidia’s future. And yes, a big part of our discussion focused on poor Olaf, whose microphone had to be turned off when he started rambling. Even if the demo had gone flawlessly, Sean might still have…

AI coding company Cursor launched a new model this week called Composer 2, which it promoted as offering “frontier-level coding intelligence.”  However, an X user posting under the name Fynn soon claimed that Composer 2 was “just Kimi 2.5” with additional reinforcement learning — Kimi 2.5 being an open source model recently released by Moonshot AI, a Chinese company backed by Alibaba and HongShan (formerly Sequoia China).  As evidence, Fynn pointed to code that seemed to identify Kimi as the model. “[A]t least rename the model ID,” they scoffed. It was a surprising revelation, since Cursor is a well-funded U.S.…

Elon Musk recently outlined ambitious plans for a chip-building collaboration between his companies Tesla and SpaceX. Bloomberg reports that Musk shared his plans on Saturday night at an event in downtown Austin, Texas, with a photo suggesting that what Musk is calling the “Terafab” facility will be built near Tesla’s Austin headquarters and “gigafactory.” Musk said he’s pursuing this project because semiconductor manufacturers aren’t making chips quickly enough for his companies’ artificial intelligence and robotics needs: “We either build the Terafab or we don’t have the chips, and we need the chips, so we build the Terafab.” The goal is…

An anonymous Substack post published this week accuses compliance startup Delve of “falsely” convincing “hundreds of customers they were compliant” with privacy and security regulations, potentially exposing those customers to “criminal liability under HIPAA and hefty fines under GDPR.” Delve is a Y Combinator-backed startup that last year announced raising a $32 million Series A at a $300 million valuation. (The round was led by Insight Partners.) On Friday, the startup attempted to refute the accusations on its blog, calling the Substack post “misleading” and saying it “contains a number of inaccurate claims.” The Substack post is credited to “DeepDelver,”…

Evolution has fostered many reproductive strategies across the spectrum of life. From dandelions to giraffes, nature finds a way.One of those ways creates quite a bit of suffering for humans: pollen, the infamous male gametophyte of the plant kingdom.In the Southeastern U.S., where I live, you know it’s spring when your car has turned yellow and pollen blankets your patio furniture and anything else left outside. Suddenly there are long lines at every car wash in town.Even people who aren’t allergic to pollen – clearly an advantage for a pollination ecologist like me – can experience sneezing and watery eyes…

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com.Why do I need to sleep for a long time at night? – Sly M., 6, Cambridge, MassachusettsJust like eating, drinking or breathing, sleep is an essential part of life.In fact, all animals do it – with some interesting variations. A dolphin, for example, sleeps with one eye open and only half of its brain snoozing at a time. This is likely because dolphins need to be partly conscious to breathe while in the water. Zebras…

Shortly after Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced AWS’s groundbreaking $50 billion investment deal with OpenAI, Amazon invited me on a private tour of the chip development lab at the heart of the deal, at (mostly*) its own expense.  Industry experts are watching Amazon’s Trainium chip, created at that facility, for its implications for lower-cost AI inference and, potentially, a dent in Nvidia’s near monopoly.   Curious, I agreed to go.   My tour guides for the day were the lab’s director, Kristopher King (pictured below right) and director of engineering Mark Carroll (below left), as well as the team’s PR person who…

ATLANTA (AP) — Allergy season can be miserable for tens of millions of Americans when trees, grass, and other pollens cause runny noses, itchy eyes, coughing and sneezing.Where you live, what you’re allergic to and your lifestyle can make a big difference when it comes to the severity of your allergies. Experts say climate change is leading to longer and more intense allergy seasons, but also point out that treatments for seasonal allergies have become more effective over the last decade.Here are some tips from experts to keep allergy symptoms at bay — maybe even enough to allow you to…

Unlocking a new vibeAt Business Insider, we like to keep you on the cutting edge of innovation and work.Vibe coding marries the two.This new tech — which enables even non-techies to code — is upending assumptions in almost every direction.That’s why we’ve created a new weekly newsletter on the topic: Vibe Mode. You can sign up here!And there’s an awful lot to cover. The prospect that vibe coding (or now “vibe designing”) will make software companies more replaceable is denting their stocks. It’s also stressing private credit, which we’re learning has financed some of these businesses. (Not everyone loves the…