Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

NEW YORK (AP) — During the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, experts worried that disruptions to cancer diagnosis and treatment would cost lives. A new study suggests they were right.The federally funded study published Thursday by the medical journal JAMA Oncology is being called the first to assess the effects of pandemic-related disruptions on the short-term survival of cancer patients.Researchers found that people diagnosed with cancer in 2020 and 2021 had worse short-term survival than those diagnosed between 2015 and 2019. That was true across a range of cancers, and whether they were diagnosed at a late or early…

The Boar’s Head deli meat plant tied to a deadly food-poisoning outbreak in 2024 is back in business, company officials said.The Jarratt, Virginia, site resumed limited operations on Monday, nearly 17 months after it was shut down following the listeria outbreak that killed 10 people and sickened dozens.Boar’s Head, a 120-year-old company based in Sarasota, Florida, permanently stopped making liverwurst and recalled 7 million pounds (more than 3 million kilograms) of deli products in the wake of the illnesses.But Natalie Dyenson, the company’s chief food safety officer, told The Associated Press that the facility has been completely revamped and tested…

An AI lab called Fundamental emerged from stealth on Thursday, offering a new foundation model to solve an old problem: how to draw insights from the huge quantities of structured data produced by enterprises. By combining the old systems of predictive AI with more contemporary tools, the company believes it can reshape how large enterprises analyze their data. “While LLMs have been great at working with unstructured data, like text, audio, video, and code, they don’t work well with structured data like tables,” CEO Jeremy Fraenkel told TechCrunch. “With our model Nexus, we have built the best foundation model to…

It’s an annual ritual in Michigan: The state proclaiming how much cash the lottery is pouring into schools. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer recently announced that for the seventh year in a row, the lottery contributed more than $1 billion to the School Aid Fund.But buying a $1 scratch-off doesn’t mean you’ve just pumped $1 into school coffers. In fact, Michigan schools get about a fourth of that — or less, depending how you count it. For every dollar spent on a lottery ticket, 63 cents goes toward prizes. Nine cents toward lottery sales commissions and 3 cents for operations and administration…

ElevenLabs co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski says voice is becoming the next major interface for AI – the way people will increasingly interact with machines as models move beyond text and screens. Speaking at Web Summit in Doha, Staniszewski told TechCrunch voice models like those developed by ElevenLabs have recently moved beyond simply mimicking human speech — including emotion and intonation – to working in tandem with the reasoning capabilities of large language models. The result, he argued, is a shift in how people interact with technology.  In the years ahead, he said, “hopefully all our phones will go back…

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — The writings of the person who killed three 9-year-olds and three adults at a private Christian elementary school in Nashville can be made available to the public, the Tennessee Court of Appeals ruled on Wednesday. The ruling is part of a yearslong dispute over public records surrounding the 2023 shooting that likely is not over yet. The shooter left behind documents that include journals, a suicide note and a memoir, according to court filings. A group of Covenant parents has been fighting to keep them from being released out of fear that the writings will further…

Scarlet Sands-Bliss, a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, typically gets up at 6 a.m. to make the drive to rural Lake County, where she’s researching how community members can prepare for extreme heat events. Last Monday evening, after a long day of meetings with tribal representatives and behavioral health workers, she hit the road again, racing down country byways to a pop-up science fair and lobbying event in Sacramento.Along with a couple dozen other students and postdocs from universities across California, she was there to present her work to state lawmakers and urge them to set up a $23 billion…

OpenAI has a pitch for software companies freaking out about AI and this week’s massive sell-off: Work with us, not against us.On Thursday, OpenAI announced “Frontier,” its new enterprise-focused platform that is set to build on the startup’s existing ChatGPT enterprise offerings and its growing team of Forward Deployed Engineers. The product is designed to give agents greater autonomy across multiple systems rather than performing isolated tasks.”Are software companies going to need to adapt to AI in general? Yes, of course,” Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, told reporters during a call ahead of Thursday’s announcement. “But I think the…

Larry Ellison has seen an unmatched $49 billion wiped off his net worth in 2026, as this week’s software rout deepened his wealth decline.Oracle’s cofounder and tech chief was worth $199 billion at Wednesday’s close, down from $247 billion at the start of January, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.A 5% slump in Oracle stock on Wednesday erased about $9 billion from his fortune. Investors have been offloading software stocks following Anthropic’s release last week of plugins for its Claude Cowork AI agent, designed to automate legal, sales, finance, marketing, and data analysis tasks for corporations.Tools of that kind threaten to…

Larry Bordeaux, 65, has been on blood thinners since 2010, after he started developing deadly clots following an operation.He credits the drugs with saving his life. If he stops taking them for several days — which he must sometimes do before certain medical procedures — clots develop quickly.Still, Bordeaux, of Havelock, North Carolina, knows that being on blood thinners is a double-edged sword: They put him at a heightened risk of serious, uncontrolled bleeding. Since he started taking them, Bordeaux has experienced complications ranging from a serious hematoma — in which a pool of blood forms outside of blood vessels…