Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Tailwind laid off 75% of the startup’s engineering staff on Monday — and its CEO blames AI.”75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business,” CEO Adam Wathan wrote in a GitHub comment that has made waves in the tech community.Tailwind, like many startups, has a small head count. In a podcast posted on X, Wathan said that the company had four engineers on staff. Now, there’s one.Wathan’s post highlights the challenges that startups, which already face tough odds of success, can encounter as AI models…

By Julie SteenhuysenCHICAGO, Jan 8 (Reuters) – An independent vaccine advisory group said on Thursday it will conduct a scientific evidence review of a vaccine used to prevent cervical and other cancers that U.S. health officials this week said should only be given as ​a single-dose, contrary to the shot’s FDA approval.The change by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sidestepped the traditional U.S. ‌review process.The new schedule recommends U.S. children receive a single dose of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine at age 11, rather than the recommended two or three doses, which varies based on the age when…

Snowflake plans to acquire Observe, an observability platform that has been built on Snowflake’s databases from day one. (Observability platforms help companies monitor their software systems and data for performance issues and bugs.) The cloud data company announced it signed a definitive agreement to acquire Observe, subject to regulatory approval, on January 8. Snowflake will integrate Observe’s product into its own to give customers a unified place to collect and store their telemetry data (logs, metrics, and traces from software systems) and better spot potential bugs and issues in their data and software. Observe was founded in 2017 by Jacob…

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Austin Peay State University has reinstated a professor who was fired for his social media post after the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The Tennessee school is also paying the teacher $500,000 in the settlement.Austin Peay spokesperson Brian Dunn said Darren Michael returned to his position as a tenured faculty member at the public university in Clarksville effective Dec. 30. A copy of the settlement agreement obtained through a public records request includes a $500,000 payment and reimbursement of counseling, as reported earlier this week by WKRN-TV.Tennessee’s governor, attorney general and comptroller signed a document…

Kim Farrell, TikTok’s global head of creators, is leaving the company, Business Insider has learned.Farrell joined TikTok nearly six years ago, starting on the company’s Latin America marketing team before shifting to its operations division and later taking over as global creator lead in late 2023. In December, she helped organize TikTok’s first awards show for creators at the Hollywood Palladium theater in Los Angeles. Prior to TikTok, Farrell worked in marketing at Booking.com and Google.Her departure was announced internally on Wednesday, as the company informed staff that it was reorganizing its content division, which includes employees who work with…

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said she wants to “get Americans away from the highly processed packaged foods,” saying those foods are driving the obesity epidemic in America, following the release on Wednesday of new federal dietary guidelines.”This is a whole flipping of the narrative,” Rollins said in an exclusive interview on “Good Morning America” that aired on Thursday. “It’s a flipping of what we’ve known over the last couple of decades.”Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the new federal dietary guidelines on Wednesday, encouraging Americans to limit highly processed food and reduce refined carbohydrates.ABC…

Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI will go to trial after a U.S. judge said there is evidence to support the billionaire’s case.  Musk sued OpenAI and its co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in 2024, alleging they betrayed their original contractual agreements by pursuing profits instead of the nonprofit’s founding mission to develop AI that benefits humanity.  Musk, who has launched his own for-profit company xAI, was an early financial backer and co-founder of OpenAI. He resigned from the board in 2018 after his bid to take over as CEO was rejected by the other co-founders, who put Altman up…

NEW YORK (AP) — The crisp crinkle of fallen leaves beneath your feet. The swish and trickle of water moving through a stream. A breath of crisp, fresh air.Spending time in nature can be invigorating or produce feelings of peace and calm. But many professions allow little time or access to the outdoors during the workday.After a youth spent climbing trees and playing soccer, Anna Rose Smith found it difficult when her first job as a psychotherapist in Utah required working in a windowless office.So she spent her lunch breaks outside, walking to nearby fountains or gardens. She picked up…

Health and medicine is more than just biological – societal forces can get under your skin and cause illness. Medical sociologists like me study these forces by treating society itself as our laboratory. Health and illness are our experiments in uncovering meaning, power and inequality, and how it affects all parts of a person’s life.For example, why do low-income communities continue to have higher death rates, despite improved social and environmental conditions across society? Foundational research in medical sociology reveals that access to resources like money, knowledge, power and social networks strongly affects a person’s health. Medical sociologists have shown…

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday proposed paring down the responsibilities of California’s elected State Superintendent of Public Instruction and shifting more power to the State Board of Education.“California can no longer postpone reforms that have been recommended regularly for a century,” Newsom said, referring to numerous reports over the years that have suggested streamlining the state’s system of K-12 school governance. “These critical reforms will bring greater accountability, clarity and coherence to how we serve our students and schools,” Newsom said.The move is intended to simplify California’s convoluted education governance, which policy analysts have said can be inefficient, redundant and…