Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

More than 500 Maine residents were informed they had died in letters that MaineHealth, the state’s largest health care provider, sent by mistake due to a computer system error.The letters were sent on Oct. 20 to 531 living patients, saying they were dead and providing instructions to their next of kin, MaineHealth told USA TODAY in an emailed statement. Officials said the mistake was due to a software malfunction.“MaineHealth sincerely regrets this error,” the provider said.According to MaineHealth, the patients who received the letters were not listed as deceased in their medical records, and the error did not affect their…

The pregnant and postpartum women who pop up on my Instagram feed are always luminous. These new mothers, some of them full-time influencers and boasting millions of followers, seem barely changed by the radical transformation of pregnancy and birth. They pose from their hospital beds with hair and makeup perfectly done (like Savannah LaBrant, who has 7 million Instagram followers). They make videos while in labor, dancing to trending songs, apparently unbothered by the daunting task that lies ahead of them (like Campbell Puckett, who has 1.4 million Instagram followers). After giving birth, they bounce back immediately, holding their newborns…

Ruth Wilson doesn’t look sick yet “everywhere hurts all the time” – because her immune system is attacking her own body.The Massachusetts woman has lupus, nicknamed the disease of 1,000 faces for its variety of symptoms — one of a rogues’ gallery of autoimmune diseases that affect tens of millions of people and are a big medical mystery. Now researchers are decoding the biology behind these debilitating diseases in hopes of eventually treating the causes, not just the symptoms.Wilson’s journey offers a glimpse of the burden.It took six years of symptoms — fevers, rashes, pain, swelling and, finally, her kidneys…

Doctor after doctor misdiagnosed or shrugged off Ruth Wilson’s rashes, swelling, fevers and severe pain for six years. She saved her life by begging for one more test in an emergency room about to send her home, again, without answers.That last-ditch test found the Massachusetts woman’s kidneys were failing. The culprit? Her immune system had been attacking her own body all that time and nobody caught it.“I just wish there was a better way that patients could get that diagnosis without having to go through all of the pain and all of, like, the dismissiveness and the gaslighting,” she said.Wilson…

By Will DunhamWASHINGTON (Reuters) -Scientists have reached a milestone in an ambitious initiative to chart how the many types of brain cells emerge and mature from the earliest embryonic and fetal stages until adulthood, knowledge that could point to new ways of tackling certain brain-related conditions like autism and schizophrenia.The researchers said they have completed a first draft of atlases of the developing human brain and the developing mammalian brain.The research focused on human and mouse brain cells, with some work in monkey brain cells too. In their initial draft, the scientists mapped the development of different types of brain…

HEIDELBERG, Miss. (AP) — The last monkey on the loose among several that escaped after a Mississippi highway crash has been found and captured, authorities said Thursday.A resident who lives near the crash site called authorities to report the animal’s location and it was then “successfully recovered,” the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks said in a statement to The Associated Press.It was the last monkey on the loose from the Oct. 28 crash when the truck overturned on Interstate 59. Five monkeys were killed as law officers hunted for them in the immediate aftermath of the crash. Video…

By Jeffrey DastinSAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Microsoft is forming a new team that wants to build artificial intelligence that is vastly more capable than humans in certain domains, starting with medical diagnostics, the executive leading the effort told Reuters.Called the MAI Superintelligence Team, the project follows similar efforts by Meta Platforms, Safe Superintelligence Inc and others that have begun targeting technical leaps while garnering skepticism for their ability to deliver, absent new breakthroughs.Microsoft plans to invest “a lot of money” on the project as well, said Mustafa Suleyman, the AI chief in charge.Meta this year offered $100 million signing bonuses to…

Every three seconds, someone in the world develops dementia. There are over 6 million people living with dementia in the U.S. and 57 million globally.These figures will only increase in the coming years, as rates of dementia are predicted to double by 2060. If you don’t know someone affected by dementia, you probably will at some point.Dementia is incredibly difficult both for the person experiencing it and for their loved ones, not only because of the symptoms of the disease but also because of the social stigma associated with cognitive decline. Experiencing stigma makes it difficult for people with dementia…

We’ve all been there: You wait 45 minutes in the exam room when the doctor finally walks in.They seem rushed. A few questions, a quick exam, a glance at the clock and then a rapid-fire plan with little time for discussion – and you leave feeling unheard, hurried and frustrated.And what if you’re hospitalized? You may face a similar experience.More than half of U.S. adults say their doctors have ignored or dismissed their concerns, or not taken their symptoms seriously, according to a December 2022 national poll.It’s easy to blame the doctor. But the reality is, most doctors would like…

With so much money flooding into AI startups, it’s a good time to be an AI researcher with an idea to test out. And if the idea is novel enough, it might be easier to get the resources you need as an independent company instead of inside one of the big labs. That’s the story of Inception, a startup developing diffusion-based AI models that just raised $50 million in seed funding led by Menlo Ventures. Andrew Ng and Andrej Karpathy provided additional angel funding. The leader of the project is Stanford professor Stefano Ermon, whose research focuses on diffusion models…