Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

New York is reporting the highest number of flu hospitalizations recorded in a single week, the state’s health department said on Friday.During the week ending Dec. 27, 4,546 people were hospitalized with flu, a 24% increase from the 3,666 who were hospitalized the previous week, according to data from the New York State Department of Health (NYSOH)It comes after the state reported a record-breaking number of flu cases in a single week with 72,133 infections during the week ending Dec. 20.What you need to know about flu treatments as cases spike across the USNYSDOH issued a declaration last month stating…

India has ordered Elon Musk’s X to make immediate technical and procedural changes to its AI chatbot Grok after users and lawmakers flagged the generation of “obscene” content, including AI-altered images of women created using the tool. On Friday, India’s IT ministry issued the order directing Musk’s X to take corrective action on Grok, including restricting the generation of content involving “nudity, sexualization, sexually explicit, or otherwise unlawful” material. The ministry also gave the social media platform 72 hours to submit an action-taken report detailing the steps it has taken to prevent the hosting or dissemination of content deemed “obscene,…

AI pioneer Yann LeCun isn’t sold on Mark Zuckerberg’s $14 billion bet on Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old Scale AI cofounder recruited to lead Meta’s Super Intelligence Lab.In a new interview with the Financial Times, Lecun, who was Meta’s chief AI scientist before announcing in November that he was leaving to form his own startup, said Wang was “inexperienced” and didn’t fully understand AI researchers.”He learns fast, he knows what he doesn’t know . . . There’s no experience with research or how you practice research, how you do it. Or what would be attractive or repulsive to a researcher,” LeCun…

Three-year-old startup Mercor has become a $10 billion middleman in AI’s data gold rush. The company connects AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic with former employees of Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and white-shoe law firms, paying them up to $200 an hour to share their industry expertise and train the AI models that could eventually automate their former employers out of business.   Today we’re bringing you a conversation with CEO Brendan Foody from this year’s Disrupt, where he explained why AI labs need high-skilled contractors instead of crowdsourced labor, how Scale AI’s troubles accelerated Mercor’s rise, and why he thinks the entire economy will converge on training AI agents.  Listen to the full…

Children who miss early vaccinations are far more likely to miss the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine by age 2, a new study found.The findings come as the U.S. recently surpassed 2,000 measles cases for the first time in more than 30 years, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).CDC data shows that MMR vaccination declined over the last several years, but the authors say that factors linked to delayed or missed vaccination since the COVID-19 pandemic have not been well studied.US measles cases surpass 2,000, highest in 30 years: CDCFor the new study, published…

Influencers are no longer a buzzy category for investors writing big checks. Artificial intelligence, social commerce, and new community apps are now the primary focus among creator economy investors.In 2025, venture capitalists and private equity firms largely avoided shelling out for startups whose businesses catered narrowly to social media stars. Some of those companies have failed to live up to investors’ growth expectations, such as FaZe Clan.Instead, VCs are making big bets on companies that are trying something new with social media, whether that’s merging e-commerce into the social feed, shaking up the content creation process with AI video generation,…

Is Miami destined to be the new Wall Street, and Austin the next Silicon Valley? “All-in” podcaster and White House AI czar David Sacks thinks so.Sacks kicked off a New Year’s social media debate by declaring that Miami will overtake New York as the nation’s financial capital — and that Austin is poised to replace San Francisco as the center of tech.”As a response to socialism, Miami will replace NYC as the finance capital and Austin will replace SF as the tech capital,” Sacks wrote in a January 1 post on X that ricocheted through tech and venture circles, drawing…

With the United States likely to lose its measles elimination status in the next few months and the possibility of looming changes to the childhood vaccine schedule, new research highlights the risk of delaying vaccination.The study, which was published Friday in JAMA Network Open, analyzed the health records of 321,743 children with regular access to care, finding that getting the vaccines recommended in the first four months is the most likely sign that a child will receive the first dose of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine at 12 to 15 months.The findings underscore a growing confusion over the…

No company has capitalized on the AI revolution more dramatically than Nvidia. Its revenue, profitability, and cash reserves have skyrocketed since the introduction of ChatGPT over three years ago — and the many competitive generative AI services that have launched since. Its stock price has soared, making it a $4.6 trillion market cap company.  The world’s leading high-performance GPU maker has used its ballooning fortunes to significantly increase investments in startups, particularly in AI.  Nvidia has participated in nearly 67 venture capital deals in 2025, surpassing the 54 deals the company completed in all of 2024, according to PitchBook data. Note…

Leaders from four groups recognized as Abenaki by Vermont’s state government have created a new school curriculum about their communities’ history — but the material includes few references, they said, to two Abenaki nations centered in Quebec.The distinction is notable because leaders of those Quebec-based nations continue to assert that many members of the groups in Vermont can’t claim legitimate Indigenous ancestry. Instead, the leaders from Odanak and Wolinak First Nations say, members of the Vermont-based groups have been appropriating Abenaki identity and culture.As the Quebec-based nations have made their case ever more forcefully in recent years, they’ve drawn sharp…