Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Darth Vader is coming to ChatGPT and OpenAI’s Sora AI video app.The House of Mouse and OpenAI struck a three-year licensing agreement on Thursday to make Disney “the first major content licensing partner on Sora.”It’s also investing $1 billion into the AI pioneer and receiving warrants to purchase additional equity.Shares of Disney jumped .6% in premarket trading and climbed over 2% after the opening bell.”As part of this new, three-year licensing agreement, Sora will be able to generate short, user-prompted social videos that can be viewed and shared by fans, drawing from a set of more than 200 animated, masked…

FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) — The father of two Kentucky State University students charged with murder in an on-campus shooting that killed one student and critically injured another was ordered held on $1 million cash bond Thursday.Jacob Lee Bard appeared by video from jail during the brief hearing. His attorney, Mark Hall, entered a not guilty plea in court on Bard’s behalf to charges of murder and first-degree assault.Police said Bard fired shots at the victims at a residence hall at the college, which is about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) east of the Capitol building in Frankfort, “There is so much…

Each December, TIME Magazine names a person of the year — someone who has most influenced the news and world, for good or ill. Last year, TIME chose President Donald Trump for the second time. The year before that, it was Taylor Swift, who many claimed saved the economy from a recession with her Eras Tour. In 1938, the magazine chose Adolf Hitler.  This year, TIME has chosen to bestow its award on not just one person, but a group of people: the so-called “Architects of AI,” comprising the CEOs shaping the global AI race from the U.S. With AI on…

If you were one of the tens of millions of AT&T customers whose personal data was leaked online in recent years, you could be eligible for up to $7,500 as part of a settlement.The company revealed in March 2024 that information belonging to millions of current and past customers had been leaked on the dark web. Four months later, AT&T said additional customer data had been illegally downloaded from a company workspace on a third-party cloud platform back in 2022.Both incidents spurred lawsuits against AT&T, which has denied any wrongdoing.Affected customers filed a consolidated class-action suit against the company in…

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Two California colleges have reached settlements with Jewish organizations and individuals who filed complaints alleging antisemitism arising from pro-Palestinian campus protests, including a $60,000 payment to an Israeli sociologist and dance researcher who says she was not rehired by the University of California, Berkeley despite the popularity of her class.UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons on Wednesday issued an apology to Yael Nativ, a visiting 2022 professor who was found in a campus investigation to have been the victim of discrimination, the Los Angeles Times reported. She is also invited to teach her class in a semester…

It’s a rare occasion when my worlds of biomedical informatics and serialized lesbian melodrama fandom collide.But that’s exactly what happened earlier this summer when two of my favorite actresses appeared on a popular podcast. I was excited to hear them talk about their new book and their history of working together, so I was confused but delighted when their conversation took a turn toward my area of expertise – electronic health records.One actress noted that on a recent trip to the optometrist, she was asked about her ethnicity. “And I was like, what difference does it make?” she said.The host…

One in 10 babies in the U.S. – nearly 374,000 infants – were born preterm in 2023, meaning before 37 weeks of pregnancy. More than 15% were very preterm, meaning they were born before 32 weeks. A full-term pregnancy lasts 40 weeks.Florida’s rate is slightly higher, at about 1 in 9 babies born preterm. In an average week, 456 of the 4,257 babies born in the state will be preterm, and 75 of those will be very preterm.According to the March of Dimes, preterm birth and low birthweight-related health complications cause 37.5% of infant deaths nationwide. This makes preterm birth…

In the past decade, AI’s success has led to uncurbed enthusiasm and bold claims – even though users frequently experience errors that AI makes. An AI-powered digital assistant can misunderstand someone’s speech in embarrassing ways, a chatbot could hallucinate facts, or, as I experienced, an AI-based navigation tool might even guide drivers through a corn field – all without registering the errors.People tolerate these mistakes because the technology makes certain tasks more efficient. Increasingly, however, proponents are advocating the use of AI – sometimes with limited human supervision – in fields where mistakes have high cost, such as health care.…

Federal health officials on Wednesday said an outbreak of infant botulism tied to recalled ByHeart baby formula has expanded to include all illnesses reported since the company began production in March 2022.Investigations by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and ByHeart are still ongoing to determine what originally caused the outbreak, but health officials warned that all ByHeart formula ever produced could have been contaminated.In an update shared Wednesday, the FDA said it “cannot rule out the possibility that contamination might have affected all ByHeart formula products.” Because of that, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is…

Measles outbreaks are growing along the Utah-Arizona border and in South Carolina, where hundreds are in quarantine.Between Friday and Tuesday, South Carolina health officials confirmed 27 new measles cases in an outbreak in and around northwestern Spartanburg County. In two months, 111 people have been sickened by the vaccine-preventable virus. More than 250 people, including students from nine area elementary, middle and high schools, are in quarantine — some for the second time since the outbreak began in October. Most of the state’s new cases stemmed from exposures at Way of Truth Church in Inman. Church leaders have been “very…