Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

The first time Patrick Thaw saw his University of Michigan friends together since sophomore year ended was bittersweet. They were starting a new semester in Ann Arbor, while he was FaceTiming in from Singapore, stranded half a world away.One day last June he was interviewing to renew his U.S. student visa, and the next his world was turned upside down by President Donald Trump’s travel ban on people from 12 countries, including Thaw’s native Myanmar.“If I knew it was going to go down this badly, I wouldn’t have left the United States,” he said of his decision to leave Michigan…

Sunny Sethi, founder of HEN Technologies, doesn’t sound like someone who’s disrupted an industry that has remained largely unchanged since the 1960s. His company builds fire nozzles — specifically, nozzles that it says increase suppression rates by up to 300% while conserving 67% of water. But Sethi is matter-of-fact about this achievement, more focused on what’s next than what’s already been done. And what’s next sounds a lot bigger than fire nozzles. His path to firefighting doesn’t follow a tidy narrative. After nabbing his PhD at the University of Akron, where he researched surfaces and adhesion, he founded ADAP Nanotech,…

Information from the conservative-leaning, AI-generated encyclopedia developed by Elon Musk’s xAI is beginning to appear in answers from ChatGPT. xAI launched Grokipedia in October, after Musk had been complaining that Wikipedia was biased against conservatives. Reporters soon noted that while many articles seemed to be copied directly from Wikipedia, Grokipedia also claimed that pornography contributed to the AIDS crisis, offered “ideological justifications” for slavery, and used denigrating terms for transgender people. All that might be expected for an encyclopedia associated with a chatbot that described itself as “Mecha Hitler” and was used to flood X with sexualized deepfakes. However, its…

AI chatbots are getting better at answering questions, summarizing documents, and solving mathematical equations, but they still largely behave like helpful assistants for one user at a time. They’re not designed to manage the messier work of real collaboration: coordinating people with competing priorities, tracking long-running decisions, and keeping teams aligned over time.  Humans&, a new startup founded by alumni of Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Google DeepMind, thinks closing that gap is the next major frontier for foundation models. The company this week raised a $480 million seed round to build a “central nervous system” for the human-plus-AI economy.…

In recent months, some of the major players in science fiction and popular culture have been taking firmer stances against generative AI. Separate decisions by San Diego Comic-Con and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) illustrate the depth of AI opposition within some creative communities — though they’re certainly not the only ones, with music distribution platform Bandcamp also recently banning generative AI. Back in December, when SFWA announced that it was updating its rules for the Nebula Awards. Works written entirely by large language models would not be eligible, while authors who used LLMs “at any point…

Federal immigration agents on Saturday shot and killed a US citizen in Minneapolis — the second fatal shooting involving ICE officers this month — adding more fuel to an already explosive national debate over immigration enforcement.The killing sparked an outcry on Minneapolis streets, as well as online, eliciting sharp responses from all sides, including leaders in the business and tech communities.The billionaire CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, Bill Ackman, for instance, wrote in a post on X that it was “time to take the temperature down before more lives are lost.”Minnesota officials, including Gov. Tim Walz, criticized the Department…

We’re about to get our first real look at the results of the recently announced AI partnership between Apple and Google, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Gurman reports that Apple is planning to announce a new version of Siri in the second half of February. Using Google’s Gemini AI models, this Siri update will reportedly be the first to live up to the promises Apple made in June 2024, with the ability to complete tasks by accessing user’s personal data and on-screen content. And that’s ahead of an even bigger upgrade that Apple plans to announce in June, at its…

ATLANTA (AP) — Dr. William Foege, a leader of one of humanity’s greatest public health victories — the global eradication of smallpox — has died.Foege died Saturday in Atlanta at the age of 89, according to the Task Force for Global Health, which he co-founded.The 6-foot-7 inch Foege literally stood out in the field of public health. A whip-smart medical doctor with a calm demeanor, he had a canny knack for beating back infectious diseases.He was director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and later held other key leadership roles…

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com.Why does burping make noise? – Henry E., age 8, Somerville, MassachusettsBurping is a normal part of everyday life.Burps happen when air from your stomach travels back up your food tube – called an esophagus – to your mouth. Air gets into your stomach during activities like eating or drinking. If you drink things that contain lots of gas – like the carbon dioxide in bubbly sodas, for example – you’ll probably burp more than usual…

ATLANTA (AP) — Your watch says you had three hours of deep sleep. Should you believe it?Millions of people rely on phone apps and wearable devices like rings, smartwatches and sensors to monitor how well they’re sleeping, but these trackers don’t necessarily measure sleep directly. Instead, they infer states of slumber from signals like heart rate and movement, raising questions about how reliable the information is and how seriously it should be taken.The U.S. sleep-tracking devices market generated about $5 billion in 2023 and is expected to double in revenue by 2030, according to market research firm Grand View Research.…