Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
Fifteen years ago, I was an out-of-place finance reporter in San Francisco, trying to reinvent myself as a tech journalist. That’s when I scored a lucky meeting with Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers, two former Apple engineers with a wild idea to make thermostats sexy.Last week, I went to see Matt Rogers again. He’s still turning ordinary household objects into extraordinary gadgets at his latest startup, Mill.When I first met Fadell and Rogers above a store above the Town and Country Village Mall across from Stanford, the two were on a quest to build internet-connected home devices at their startup…
GLP-1 weight loss drugs are still far from cheap, but some of the prices keep dropping.Novo Nordisk is now offering people who pay out of pocket a steep discount for select doses of Ozempic and Wegovy, the company said Monday.Until the end of March, Novo Nordisk will let people with prescriptions buy the two lowest doses for $199 a month for two months. After that, the drugs will cost $349 a month. The deal will be available through the Ozempic and Wegovy websites, where people can register for the discounts to use at pharmacies and through telehealth.The $199-per-month offer applies…
By Nancy Lapid(Reuters) -Researchers monitoring the brain activity of a patient with a severe binge-eating problem reported that Eli Lilly’s GLP-1 weight-loss drug appeared to temporarily suppress food-craving signals in the “reward center” of the brain.These are the first direct measurements of brain activity in a person receiving tirzepatide, sold as Mounjaro for diabetes and Zepbound for weight loss, shedding light on the treatment’s impact on so-called food noise.The report, published on Monday in Nature Medicine, describes the effect of tirzepatide on a single individual, and the findings cannot be generalized to others, the researchers cautioned. But it may suggest…
Tim Cook has been running Apple for more than 14 years, but he won’t be CEO forever.With leadership transitions this year, including Cook’s longtime number two, Jeff Williams, announcing his retirement before 2026, John Ternus has emerged as a likely frontrunner for the top job, according to reports in the last year and a half.The 65-year-old could leave the role as early as next year after Apple’s January earnings report, the Financial Times recently reported, and that the iPhone maker has intensified succession planning. Bloomberg previously identified Ternus as “the most likely heir apparent.”Cook has previously said that his ideal…
Alice Wong, the trailblazing disability rights advocate and author, died on Nov. 14 at a hospital in San Francisco. She was 51.Wong, the founder of the Disability Visibility Project, died of an infection, her family said in a statement posted on social media by Wong’s friend Sandy Ho, executive director of the Disability & Philanthropy Forum.”She will be remembered as being a fierce luminary in disability justice, a brilliant writer, editor and community organizer,” her family said.Alice Wong, author of “Disability Visibility.”Ho shared a message Wong wrote before her death in which she said she never imaged she “would live…
By Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen and Maggie FickCOPENHAGEN (Reuters) -Novo Nordisk said on Monday it would lower the U.S. price of its injectable Wegovy obesity drug and pledged to go “all in” on its upcoming oral weight-loss pill, as the firm races to claw back lost ground in the lucrative market.The Danish drugmaker is waiting for a U.S. regulatory decision on the oral version of Wegovy by year-end, with the pill format expected to appeal to patients who prefer to avoid injections of the current Wegovy formulation.”We have more than enough pills this time, so we’re going to go all in and…
Hours after savoring that perfectly grilled steak on a beautiful summer evening, your body turns traitor, declaring war on the very meal you just enjoyed. You begin to feel excruciating itchiness, pain or even swelling that can escalate to the point of requiring emergency care.The culprit isn’t food poisoning – it’s the fallout from a tick bite you may have gotten months earlier and didn’t even notice.This delayed allergic reaction is called alpha-gal syndrome. While it’s commonly called the “red meat allergy,” that nickname is misleading, because alpha-gal syndrome can cause strong reactions to many products, beyond just red meat.The…
A Chinese Tesla rival is betting on huggability to take on Elon Musk’s Optimus robot.EV startup Xpeng unveiled the latest version of its humanoid robot, called Iron, earlier this month, and CEO He Xiaopeng said the company wanted its bipedal bots to be “highly human-like.”In an earnings call on Monday, he told analysts that Xpeng had found adding fake muscles and “bionic skin” to Iron made people more comfortable touching and even hugging the robot.”This is very exciting because traditional robots really were not that attractive and appealing for human beings to give them a hug,” said Xiaopeng. Xiaopeng said…
The biggest companies in the world are spending billions and billions on AI — specifically on “large language models” like the kind that power the likes of ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Meta’s Llama.That’s a mistake, says the man who, until recently, headed Meta’s AI push.”LLMs are great, they’re useful, we should invest in them — a lot of people are going to use them,” said Yann LeCun, who’s still an AI researcher at Meta for the moment, speaking at an event in Brooklyn Sunday night. “They are not a path to human-level intelligence. They’re just not. Right now, they are…
Google is rolling out new AI-powered features to book and plan travel in Search, the company announced on Monday. The tech giant is expanding availability for its AI-powered “Flight Deals” tool, adding the ability for users to organize travel plans with its “Canvas” tool in AI Mode, and launching agentic booking capabilities to more people. Google first launched Flight Deals back in August in the U.S., Canada, and India. Now, the company is expanding the AI-powered search tool within Google Flights globally to help people quickly find affordable destinations. To get started, users need to describe where, when, and how…