Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Two people have died and at least 58 people have been diagnosed with Legionnaires’ disease in a cluster that broke out in the Harlem area of New York City last week, officials said on Monday.The New York City Health Department had reported on Thursday that one person had died and 22 people were sick in the cluster.MORE: 1 dead and at least 22 sick from Legionnaires’ disease cluster in New York City“People living or working in the area with flu-like symptoms, such as cough, fever, chills, muscle aches, or difficulty breathing should contact a health care provider immediately,” the department…

EAGAN, Minn. (AP) — Harrison Smith, just like anyone approaching middle age, has learned to accept the realities of getting older. The joints, for one, don’t quite move as effortlessly as they once did.So that’s where the 14th-year free safety for the Minnesota Vikings has aimed his recent training regimens, customizing resistance exercises to simulate the stress that NFL games can place on critical areas of the body. Reaching at full extension to make a tackle at full speed puts the arm muscles and tendons in a vulnerable position. The more fluidly the elbow can bend, the better.“All the strength…

KARACHI, Pakistan (AP) — For nearly four decades, the World Health Organization and partners have been trying to rid the world of polio, a paralytic disease that has existed since prehistoric times. While cases have dropped more than 99%, polio remains entrenched in parts of Afghanistanand Pakistan.In its quest to eliminate the virus, WHO and its partners in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative have been derailed by mismanagement and what insiders describe as blind allegiance to an outdated strategy and a problematic oral vaccine, according to workers, polio experts and internal materials obtained by the Associated Press.Officials tout the successes…

KARACHI, Pakistan (AP) — For the past decade, Sughra Ayaz has traveled door to door in southeastern Pakistan, pleading with parents to allow children to be vaccinated against polio as part of a global campaign to wipe out the paralytic disease. She hears their demands and fears. Some are practical – families need basics like food and water more than vaccines. Others are simply unfounded – the oral doses are meant to sterilize their kids.Amid rampant misinformation and immense pressure for the campaign to succeed, Ayaz said, some managers have instructed workers to falsely mark children as immunized. And the…

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Tennessee is gearing up for an execution on Tuesday that experts say would likely mark the first time a man has been put to death with a working defibrillator in his chest.Gov. Bill Lee declined Monday to grant a reprieve, clearing the way for Byron Black’s execution after a legal battle and ongoing uncertainty about whether the implantable cardioverter-defibrillator will shock his heart when the lethal drug takes effect.The nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center said it’s unaware of any other cases in which a person on death row made similar claims to Black’s about defibrillators or…

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — In Kabul’s alleys and courtyards, boys in white caps and tunics recite verses from the Quran in a growing network of madrassas, the religious schools increasingly filling the gaps in Afghanistan’s fractured education system.While public schools still operate, their reach has been weakened by limited resources, teacher shortages and decades of conflict. In response, many families now turn to madrassas, which offer structured learning rooted in Islamic teachings. Enrollment is booming. One school north of Kabul has grown from 35 students to more than 160 in five years.Most madrassas focus on Quranic memorization, jurisprudence and Arabic,…

A Palantir exec had some strong words for Large Language Models.The Denver-based AI software company reported its first-ever billion-dollar quarter in Monday’s Q2 earnings report, and the executives opened the investors call with comments on LLMs and how it plans to win the AI race.”LLMs, on their own, are at best a jagged intelligence divorced from even basic understanding,” Ryan Taylor, the company’s chief revenue officer and chief legal officer, told shareholders on the earnings call. “In one moment, they may appear to outperform humans in some problem-solving task, but in the next, they make catastrophic errors no human would…

If you want to succeed in AI, a good hack would be to impersonate Google. You just can’t get caught.This is what just happened to Perplexity, a startup that competes with ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and other generative AI services.Quality data is crucial for success in AI, but tech companies don’t want to pay for this, so they crawl the web and scrape information for free, often without permission. This has sparked a backlash by some content creators and others interested in preserving the incentives that built the web.Cloudflare and its CEO, Matthew Prince, have stormed into this battle with new…

Nations gather in Geneva Tuesday to try to complete a landmark treaty aimed at ending the plastic pollution crisis that affects every ecosystem and person on the planet.It’s the sixth time negotiators are meeting and they hope the last. A key split is whether the treaty should require cutting plastic production, with powerful oil-producing nations opposed; most plastic is made from fossil fuels. They say redesign, recycling and reuse can solve the problem, while other countries and some major companies say that’s not enough.Only a treaty can mobilize the necessary global action, said Angelique Pouponneau, lead ocean negotiator for 39…

As more people aged 45-49 are getting screened for colon cancer, more early stage diagnoses are being made, according to new research from the American Cancer Society.The research, published in two studies Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, showed increases in screenings among those younger than 50 is linked to rises in earlier diagnosis. One study showed an annual increase of 1.1% from 2004 to 2019 jumped to 12% from 2019 to 2022 for colorectal cancer incidence among people aged 45 to 49, while another study showed screenings among U.S. adults aged 45 to 49 increase 62% from…