Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
PARIS, Jan 29 (Reuters) – Consumer rights campaign group foodwatch filed a criminal complaint in Paris on Thursday on behalf of eight families whose babies it says fell ill after consuming contaminated infant formula, claiming companies waited too long to warn the public.Several companies, including Nestle, Danone and Lactalis, have withdrawn batches of infant formula in the past month over concerns about possible contamination with a toxin cereulide that can cause nausea and vomiting.Berlin-based non-profit foodwatch, which operates against food corporations and regulatory authorities in Europe, said babies had developed repeated vomiting, diarrhea, fever and abdominal pain, and some required…
“Can other people, please, for the love of God, in the name of all that is holy, can others please build this stuff?”Elon Musk made the plea in the final moments of Tesla’s earnings call on Wednesday, sounding a bit fired up.Musk had just finished giving a blunt warning to American companies: build more battery-making infrastructure in the US or risk falling behind.The Tesla CEO argued that too many companies are underestimating their exposure to geopolitical risks posed by fragile supply chains, particularly for critical materials used in electric vehicles and energy storage.”There are so many companies out there that…
By Sriparna RoyJan 29 (Reuters) – More than a million fewer Americans have signed up for Obamacare plans for 2026, with enrollment dropping to about 23 million as monthly premiums for many soared due to the expiration of extra COVID-19 pandemic health insurance subsidies.Total premium costs for subsidized Obamacare enrollees are expected to increase to an average $1,904 for 2026 from $888 in 2025, according to health-research firm KFF.In 2025, about 24.2 million people had the plans, created by former President Barack Obama’s signature Affordable Care Act. Private insurers, including Centene, Elevance, UnitedHealth offer the plans, which are subsidized based…
Google DeepMind is opening up access to Project Genie, its AI tool for creating interactive game worlds from text prompts or images. Starting Thursday, Google AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S. can play around with the experimental research prototype, which is powered by a combination of Google’s latest world model Genie 3, its image-generation model Nano Banana Pro, and Gemini. Coming five months after Genie 3’s research preview, the move is part of a broader push to gather user feedback and training data as DeepMind races to develop more capable world models. World models are AI systems that generate an…
Several countries, including Thailand and Nepal, have increased their surveillance after cases of the deadly Nipah virus were detected in India.So far, just two cases have been confirmed among 25-year-old nurses, a woman and a man, in West Bengal, according to the World Health Organization.A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services told ABC News earlier this week that Indian health authorities have deployed an outbreak response team and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is in contact with local officials. The CDC said it is “monitoring” the situation.Despite the virus’s high fatality rate, experts have said…
After rapidly hitting the top of the App Store in October, OpenAI’s video-generation app Sora is now struggling. New data suggests the app is seeing declines in both app downloads and consumer spending, as the early hype about the AI video social network wears off. Powered by OpenAI’s video generation model Sora 2, the iOS version topped 100,000 installs on day one, despite being an invite-only experience. It soon hit the No. 1 spot on the U.S. App Store, and it reached the 1 million downloads milestone faster than ChatGPT. At the time, Sora’s app was iOS-only and still required…
A cohort of music publishers led by Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group are suing Anthropic, saying the company illegally downloaded more than 20,000 copyrighted songs, including sheet music, song lyrics, and musical compositions. The publishers said in a statement on Wednesday that the damages could amount to more than $3 billion, which would be one of the largest non-class action copyright cases filed in U.S. history. This lawsuit was filed by the same legal team from the Bartz v. Anthropic case, in which a group of fiction and nonfiction authors similarly accused the AI company of using their…
As AI races into classrooms worldwide, Google is finding that the toughest lessons on how the tech can actually scale are emerging not from Silicon Valley, but from India’s schools. India has become a proving ground for Google’s education AI amid intensifying competition from rivals, including OpenAI and Microsoft. With more than a billion internet users, the country now accounts for the highest global usage of Gemini for learning, according to Chris Phillips, Google’s vice president and general manager for education, within an education system shaped by state-level curricula, strong government involvement, and uneven access to devices and connectivity. Phillips…
Last week, the Trump administration announced it was banning the use of human fetal tissue from some abortions in federally funded medical research.The National Institutes of Health (NIH) said the policy would go into effect immediately and advance “science by investing in breakthrough technologies more capable of modeling human health and disease,” NIH director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said in a statement.Scientists told ABC News that research using human fetal tissue has contributed to understanding diseases better, such as HIV and Ebola, and helped in the development of some vaccines and drugs.Changes at NIH give political appointees greater power to fund or…
A new AI lab called Flapping Airplanes launched on Wednesday, with $180 million in seed funding from Google Ventures, Sequoia, and Index. The founding team is impressive, and the goal — finding a less data-hungry way to train large models — is a particularly interesting one. Based on what I’ve seen so far, I would rate them as Level Two on the trying-to-make-money scale. But there’s something even more exciting about the Flapping Airplanes project that I hadn’t been able to put my finger on until I read this post from Sequoia partner David Cahn. As Cahn describes it, Flapping…