Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Although SNAP benefits returned for millions of Americans after the federal government shutdown ended earlier this month, food banks and pantries across the U.S. are still seeing droves of people showing up to receive aid.Nearly 42 million Americans, including low-income families and vulnerable households, rely on SNAP, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, to help pay for groceries or other household essentials.Despite many states saying that benefits would be available immediately following the disruption, workers at food distribution sites are seeing a surge of people — a trend they say is likely to continue into the holidays.SNAP is back, but…

WASHINGTON (AP) — A coalition of nursing and other health care organizations are angry over a Trump administration plan that could limit access to student loans in some cases.Students pursuing graduate degrees in nursing, physical therapy, public health and some other fields would face tighter federal student loan limits under the plan because it doesn’t consider them professional programs.The revamp is part of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” passed by Congress.While graduate students could previously borrow loans up to the cost of their degree, the new rules would set caps depending on whether the degree is considered a graduate or professional…

There’s a new AI-powered toy for kids called Stickerbox, and, before you groan, I’m here to report that it’s surprisingly fun. Stickerbox, a product born out of Brooklyn-based startup Hapiko, is a voice-activated sticker printer. The device takes whatever creative idea you have in your head and transforms it into a printed sticker that you can then color, peel, and stick anywhere. Before trying the device itself, I have to admit I came with a preconceived negative bias — as did my fellow tester (my daughter). Our initial reactions were similiar: “An AI that prints stickers? I’d rather design and…

Q: What are the demographics of birth and death? – N. Kabugu in TexasA: Great question, Mr. Kabugu! Unlike much of Europe and East Asia, America hasn’t reached the point at which we have more people dying than we do being born.Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post. At least not in the long run. We briefly blew past that point in a few winter months at the height of the covid-19 pandemic, according to our analysis of birth- and death-certificate data collected by the National Vital Statistics System.That’s mostly…

Q: What are the demographics of birth and death? – N. Kabugu in TexasA: Great question, Mr. Kabugu! Unlike much of Europe and East Asia, America hasn’t reached the point at which we have more people dying than we do being born.Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post. At least not in the long run. We briefly blew past that point in a few winter months at the height of the covid-19 pandemic, according to our analysis of birth- and death-certificate data collected by the National Vital Statistics System.That’s mostly…

Amazon Web Services is making a sizable new investment in infrastructure designed to boost AI capabilities for U.S. government organizations. AWS announced Monday it is investing $50 billion to build AI “high-performance computing infrastructure” purposefully built for the U.S. government. The buildout is meant to expand federal government agencies’ access to AWS AI services. The project will add 1.3 gigawatts of compute and will expand government access to AWS products, including Amazon SageMaker AI, model customization, Amazon Bedrock, model deployment, and Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, among others, according to the company. AWS expects to break ground on these data center projects…

On Monday, Anthropic announced Opus 4.5, the latest version of its flagship model. It’s the last of Anthropic’s 4.5 series of models to be released, following the launch of Sonnet 4.5 in September and Haiku 4.5 in October. As expected, the new version of Opus has state-of-the-art performance on a range of benchmarks, including coding benchmarks (SWE-Bench and Terminal-bench), tool use (tau2-bench and MCP Atlas) and general problem solving (ARC-AGI 2, GPQA Diamond).  Notably, Opus 4.5 is the first model to score over 80 percent on SWE-Bench verified, a respected coding benchmark. Anthropic also emphasized the Opus’s computer use and…

More than 25,000 cases of whooping cough have been recorded in the U.S. so far this year, updated federal data shows.This marks the second year in a row with higher than usual cases, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). At the same time this year, around 33,000 cases reported.Cases are well above pre-pandemic levels. In 2019, about 18,600 whooping cough cases were recorded, CDC data shows.Whooping cough cases skyrocket in Texas, quadrupling last year’s numbersExcluding last year, the last time whooping cough cases were this high was in 2014 when more than 32,900 cases…

Anthropic is once again raising the bar in the AI race.On Monday, the company unveiled Claude Opus 4.5, which it calls its most advanced AI model yet, just three months after its previous release.Anthropic says the latest version delivers major improvements in generating computer code and workplace documents, such as Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. It also includes new capabilities for creating more sophisticated, long-running AI agents.”It’s the most intelligent model in the world for the things that we really care about,” Alex Albert, Anthropic’s head of developer relations, told Business Insider.The launch completes the Claude 4.5 family, following recent…

A new influenza strain this flu season is raising concerns as Americans hit the roads and take to the skies ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday, with fewer people choosing to get vaccinated.What is the new flu strain subclade K?The new flu strain, called subclade K, is a variant of the H3N2 virus that has been circulating since the summer in other countries.Experts point to the new variant as a main driver of a spike in flu cases in Canada, Japan, and the U.K. Of nearly 150 test samples that were registered as the H3 lineage, over 50% were subclade K,…