Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
KIGALI, Rwanda (AP) — Rwanda will test technology powered by artificial intelligence in more than 50 health clinics as part of a new initiative by the Gates Foundation to support 1,000 clinics across Africa with the aim to improve health care services.The technology is intended to strengthen rather than replace clinical judgment, while improving efficiency within an already stretched health system, Andrew Muhire, a senior official with Rwanda’s Ministry of Health, told The Associated Press on Thursday.Rwanda now has one health care worker for 1,000 patients — far from the globally recommended ratio of 4:1,000.The Gates Foundation and OpenAI on…
DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — Guinea-Bissau is suspending a Trump administration-backed hepatitis B vaccine study on newborns in the West African country, pending an ethical review, the health minister said Thursday.A six-person ethics committee didn’t meet to review the study during the initial confirmation process, Health Minister Quinhi Nantot said during a news conference held by the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The study is designed as a randomized controlled trial, with some infants given the hepatitis B vaccine at birth and others not. Children will be tracked for death, illness and long-term developmental outcomes. Some experts have suggested that…
Colorectal cancer is now the leading cause of cancer deaths among people younger than 50 in the United States, according to a study published Thursday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.Colorectal cancer death rates in that age group climbed by 1% every year since 2005, in stark contrast with the larger trend: Overall, cancer death rates in people younger than 50 have dropped by 44% since 1990. And of the five most common causes of cancer-related death in people younger than 50, colorectal cancer deaths were the only one to increase.“It is absolutely an outlier,” said Rebecca Siegel,…
Colorectal cancer is now the leading cause of cancer deaths among people younger than 50 in the United States, according to a study published Thursday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.Colorectal cancer death rates in that age group climbed by 1% every year since 2005, in stark contrast with the larger trend: Overall, cancer death rates in people younger than 50 have dropped by 44% since 1990. And of the five most common causes of cancer-related death in people younger than 50, colorectal cancer deaths were the only one to increase.“It is absolutely an outlier,” said Rebecca Siegel,…
NEW YORK (AP) — New York City nurses on strike headed back to the bargaining table Thursday with hospital administrators to try to bring an end to the city’s biggest walkout of its kind in decades.The New York State Nurses Association said contract negotiations resumed in the morning with officials at the three private hospital systems impacted by the strike: Montefiore, Mount Sinai and NewYork-Presbyterian.The union said nurses are committed to bargaining daily to settle the dispute.Roughly 15,000 nurses walked off the job on Jan. 12, prompting the hospitals to bring on thousands of temporary workers to keep operations running.“Nurses…
AI Mode, Google’s conversational Search feature for complex questions, is getting more personalized. The tech giant announced on Thursday that it’s bringing “Personal Intelligence” to AI Mode, enabling it to tap into your Gmail and Google Photos to provide more individualized responses. The company first debuted Personal Intelligence last week in the Gemini app to allow the AI assistant to tailor its responses by connecting across your Google ecosystem, starting with Gmail, Photos, Search, and YouTube history. The opt-in feature is now starting to roll out to AI Mode to Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers in English in…
The top talent behind yet another promising AI startup has been gobbled up by an incumbent. As part of a new licensing agreement, Google DeepMind is bringing on the CEO and several of the top engineers at voice AI startup Hume AI, reports Wired. What’s left of Hume AI will continue to supply its technology to other AI firms. No financial details of the deal were shared. TechCrunch has reached out to Google and Hume AI to confirm the news. CEO Alan Cowen and about seven other engineers will work with DeepMind to improve Gemini’s voice features, according to Wired. …
NEW YORK (AP) — Beth Brown was assigned to a major project at work when hardship struck. First, her 6-month-old daughter fell ill with COVID-19. A few days later, her mother passed away.Brown, director of health and well-being at a company that provides employee mental health programs and absence management services, sent a note to the senior ComPsych director who was her partner on the project, explaining she would have to miss work to care for her daughter and to make funeral arrangements. “The guilt that I felt for knowing I was going to leave her dry on my end,”…
Twenty years ago, a Duke University professor, David R. Smith, used artificial composite materials called “metamaterials” to make a real-life invisibility cloak. While this cloak didn’t really work like Harry Potter’s, exhibiting limited ability to conceal objects from the light of a single microwave length, those advances in material science did eventually trickle down to electromagnetism research. Today, Austin-based Neurophos, a photonics startup spun out of Duke University and Metacept (an incubator run by Smith), is taking that research further to solve what may be the biggest problem facing AI labs and hyperscalers: how to scale computing power while keeping…
Since 2024, Anthropic’s performance optimization team has given job applicants a take-home test to make sure they know their stuff. But as AI coding tools have gotten better, the test has had to change a lot to keep candidates from simply filling in all the answers with Claude. Team lead Tristan Hume described the history of the challenge in a blog post on Wednesday. “Each new Claude model has forced us to redesign the test,” Hume writes. “When given the same time limit, Claude Opus 4 outperformed most human applicants. That still allowed us to distinguish the strongest candidates —…