Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

There are “two different Americas” when it comes to birth control, family planning experts say.A new report finds that only a third of states protect access to affordable contraception through their policies, such as Medicaid expansion or requiring health insurers to pay for prescriptions for months at a time.The report, released Wednesday, analyzed current birth control policies across the 50 states and Washington, D.C. It comes as finding affordable birth control becomes more difficult for many women across the country and as conservative state and federal lawmakers look to limit access to some forms of contraception.The report — a state-by-state…

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that Arkansas can enforce its ban on critical race theory in classrooms, ruling the First Amendment doesn’t give students the right to compel the state to offer its instruction in public schools.A three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated a preliminary injunction issued against the ban, one of several changes adopted under an education overhaul that Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed in 2023.The prohibition is being challenged by two teachers and two students at Little Rock Central High School, site of the 1957 desegregation…

Rare-earth elements appear to be behind Nvidia’s stance on China.  After announcing in June plans to essentially withdraw from the Chinese market, the semiconductor chip and AI giant reversed course and said it was filing an application to restart sales of its H20 AI chip to China. U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Tuesday that Nvidia’s plans to start selling its H20 AI chips are tied to ongoing trade discussions with China regarding rare-earth elements, according to reporting from Reuters. AMD plans to restart sales of its MI308 AI chip in China too. Rare-earth elements (REE) like lanthanum and cerium, which are…

Just five days after opening up orders on its Reachy Mini robots, AI developer platform Hugging Face says it has logged $1 million worth of sales. That’s not a bad start for a company that’s just recently expanded into robotics, and is largely known for letting developers download open source AI models off the internet. On this episode of Equity, Hugging Face co-founder and chief scientist Thomas Wolf breaks down where he sees the company’s robotics going. While other startups tackling robots for the home — such as Figure and 1X — want their robots to offload some of your…

Scale AI just laid off approximately 200 full-time employees (14% of its 1,400-person workforce) and 500 contractors, according to the company.This comes after Meta invested $14 billion into Scale AI last month as part of a blockbuster AI deal that included the hiring of Scale’s ex-CEO, Alexandr Wang, to lead its new Superintelligence group and the purchase of equity in almost half the data labeling startup.The company is ‘restructuring’ its GenAI group, according to an email from Scale’s interim CEO, Jason Droege, obtained by Business Insider. The GenAI organization is a core part of Scale that manages its work on some of…

Google is rolling out an agentic AI-powered business calling feature to all users in the United States, the company announced on Wednesday. The tech giant is also enhancing Google Search’s AI Mode by bringing its Gemini 2.5 Pro model to the search experience and introducing deep research capabilities. The new business calling feature uses AI to call local businesses on your behalf to collect information about availability and pricing. The idea behind the feature is to help you access information without having to actually pick up the phone and talk to someone. Google first began testing the feature back in…

Serial entrepreneur Uri Levine helped build two navigation companies that achieved roughly billion-dollar exits.But he predicts kids born today, known as Generation Beta, won’t end up behind the wheel.”They will not drive,” the Waze cofounder told Business Insider. “A generation after that, if you will tell them that you used to drive cars yourself, they will not believe you.”Levine’s comments come in the wake of Tesla launching its robotaxi service in Austin to a small group of users. Elon Musk has said that the vehicles will be in “many other cities” in the country by the end of 2025 and…

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to supercharge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth with 300 million weekly active users. 2024 was a big year for OpenAI, from its partnership with Apple for its generative AI offering, Apple Intelligence, the release of GPT-4o with voice capabilities, and the highly-anticipated launch of its text-to-video model Sora. OpenAI also faced its share of internal drama, including the notable exits of high-level execs like co-founder and longtime chief…

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — An item in Republicans’ sweeping policy and tax bill intended to block Medicaid dollars from flowing to Planned Parenthood, the nation’s biggest abortion provider, is also hitting a major medical provider in Maine.Maine Family Planning filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration Wednesday seeking to restore the reimbursements.Accessing health care in Maine — one of the Northeast’s poorest states and its most rural — is a challenge in areas far from population centers such as Portland and Bangor.Vanessa Shields-Haas, a nurse practitioner, said the organization’s clinics have been seeing all patients as usual and completing Medicaid…

Facebook Tweet Email Link Are you not as strong and physically capable as you would like? Around 7% to 12% of Americans 65 and older are considered frail. That’s when at least three of the following symptoms are true, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine: unintentional weight loss, reduced strength, exhaustion, low activity levels and a slow pace. Frailty often makes it difficult for older adults to complete day-to-day tasks. But there may be something they can do about it. Increasing a person’s walking cadence by 14 steps per minute was associated with a 10% increase in functional capacity in prefrail…