Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Redwood Materials, the battery recycling startup run by Tesla cofounder JB Straubel, just raised $350 million in a funding round that pushes its valuation past $6 billion.The deal, led by Eclipse with participation from Nvidia’s venture capital arm NVentures, supports Redwood’s surprising new role powering the generative AI boom.At first glance, a company known for reclaiming metals such as cobalt, nickel, and lithium might seem far removed from the realm of large language models and GPU clusters. But as AI data centers multiply across the US, power has become a defining bottleneck. Redwood’s growing grid energy storage business aims to…

WASHINGTON (AP) — After decades of gradual growth, the number of Black students enrolling at many elite colleges has dropped in the two years since the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in admissions, leaving some campuses with Black populations as small as 2% of their freshman class, according to an Associated Press analysis.New enrollment figures from 20 selective colleges provide mounting evidence of a backslide in Black enrollment. On almost all of the campuses, Black students account for a smaller share of new students this fall than in 2023. At Princeton and some others, the number of new Black students…

Tesla’s Optimus robot has apparently mastered kung fu. Its next trick? Heart surgery.Elon Musk’s bipedal bot was the hot topic of Tesla’s latest earnings call. Musk said Optimus could become “infinite money glitch” capable of driving Tesla’s profits to new heights — and he suggested the company’s robotic biped will also be “an incredible surgeon.””Imagine if everyone had access to an incredible surgeon. Of course, we need to make sure Optimus is safe and everything. But I do think we’re headed for a world of sustainable abundance,” said Musk, adding that Tesla’s goal was to create a world without poverty…

Within throwing distance of Apple stores around Manhattan and Google’s New York HQ, bus stop posters teased the Big Tech giants.”AI can’t generate sand between your toes,” one read. “No one on their deathbed ever said: I wish I’d spent more time on my phone,” said another.The ribbing came from Polaroid, promoting its point-and-click Flip camera.”We are such an analog brand that basically gave us the permission: We can own that conversation,” said Patricia Varella, Polaroid’s creative director.It has some competition. A wave of anti-AI ads is appearing on TV screens, billboards, and social media feeds worldwide, as big brands…

Elon Musk wants Grok’s name in lights.Grok Imagine, an image and video generation tool, debuted in July. Musk said earlier this month that the company plans to release a “watchable” full-length film by the end of 2026, and “really good movies” in 2027. He has hyped up the chatbot’s image generation skills, from reenactments of the final scene of “King Kong” to a version of “Iron Man” in which he plays Tony Stark.Over the past few months, employees at the AI company have worked on multiple internal video annotation projects.In August, dozens of AI tutors began painstakingly annotating short video…

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Swathes of New Zealand were pummeled by dangerous winds for the second time in a week on Thursday, with howling gales canceling hundreds of flights, causing electricity blackouts and forcing school closures. The gales were worst in the lower North Island, where the capital Wellington is located, and in parts of the South Island, including the city of Christchurch. The national forecaster MetService issued rare “red” wind warnings, the highest level of alert, for several regions. No deaths or serious injuries were reported. When a different weather system battered the country on Monday, a Wellington…

Elon Musk capped Tesla’s latest earnings call with a tirade about his proposed $1 trillion pay package — and the people trying to block it.The CEO said he doesn’t even want to call it “compensation,” insisting the real issue is whether he’ll have enough voting power to control Tesla’s next chapter in AI, robotaxis, and humanoid robots.”I just don’t feel comfortable building a robot army here and then being ousted because of some asinine recommendations from ISS and Glass Lewis,” Musk said, calling the proxy advisory firms “corporate terrorists.”He said he needs about “mid-20s” percent voting power to maintain “a…

It’s officially the season of text prompts and phone call reminders to get your seasonal vaccines.Cases of flu, RSV, COVID-19, and other common respiratory illnesses tend to spike as temperatures go down and the holidays approach, sending many Americans to pharmacy lines and waiting rooms to get up-to-date on immunizations.Confusion has persisted around one specific shot: the COVID-19 vaccine. After a year of rapidly changing guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., many Americans have been left to wonder how easily a person could…

Pottstown, Pennsylvania — Illeana Casiano-Vazquez and her husband Sam cherish every minute together. Six years ago, she was diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer, an aggressive form of the cancer that has fewer treatment options and a higher rate of recurrence.”The first thing I thought about were my boys,” Casiano-Vasquez told CBS News. “So, in the same feeling of, ‘Oh my God, am I going to die?’ sort of was this immediate like, ‘I’m not going to die.'”Chemotherapy and a double mastectomy eliminated signs of cancer. But naturally, she is still worried.”The mental struggle that comes with the fear of recurrence…

Remember that Tea app everyone was talking about this summer? Apple has removed it from its iOS App Store.The Tea app, which lets women post anonymous reviews of men, gained traction in July and stirred a whole lot of debate around privacy and modern dating.In reaction to Tea — technically named Tea Dating Advice — other copycats made their way onto the app store. TeaOnHer, an alternative version for men, had a viral moment in August.Both TeaOnHer and Tea were removed by Apple on October 21, according to app analytics firm Appfigures.A spokesperson for Apple told Business Insider that both…