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U.S. pediatricians and infectious disease experts say the fight against rising measles cases nationwide is being hampered by a lack of forceful advocacy for vaccination from government health officials and statements on unproven treatments that are confusing parents. Since January, 505 people have been infected in Texas and more than 90 total in neighboring New Mexico, Oklahoma and Kansas. Two children have died in Texas, including an 8-year-old girl last week, and an adult death in New Mexico is under investigation. The United States has more than 600 known cases and outbreaks in six states, according to HHS. Dr. Sue Kressly, president of the American Academy of …

In the months following 2023’s Writers Guild of America (WGA) and Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) strikes, film-industry workers adopted a refrain: “Survive ‘til ‘25” — a meager goal reflecting industry reality. The strikes came shortly after the Covid-19 pandemic ground production to a halt. The dream factory had become a nightmare. The pandemic-inflicted production pause bled workers’ savings, forcing many to seek income outside the industry. Once work restarted, those who wanted to return to work — grips, camera operators, writers, directors, administrative staff, the Teamsters who ferry cast and crew to film set…

A major Burger King franchisee with dozens of locations has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Consolidated Burger Holdings, based in Destin, Florida, filed the court documents this week in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Florida. The franchisee now operates 57 Burger King restaurants in Florida and Georgia, after it reportedly closed 18 locations before its Chapter 11 filing. “Over the past several years, and particularly as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Debtors’ business suffered significantly from loss of foot traffic, resulting in declining revenue without proportionate decreases in rental obligations, debt service, and other liab…

Recently, Grok AI faced criticism after users found it was creating explicit images of real people, including women and children. Although xAI has now implemented some restrictions, this incident revealed a serious weakness. Without safeguards and diverse perspectives, girls and women are put at greater risk. The dangers artificial intelligence poses to women and girls are real and happening now, affecting their mental health, safety, healthcare, and economic opportunities. Last fall, a mother discovered why her teenage daughter’s mental health had been deteriorating: It was a result of conversations with a Character.AI chatbot. She’s not alone. Aura’s State of Youth …

At NVIDIA’s developer conference on Thursday, a large group of energy companies—along with a few technology companies—announced plans to collaborate on building AI models and apps aimed at improving the generation and distribution of electric power. The initiative, called the Open Power AI Consortium, is organized by the Palo Alto-based Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). Founding members include Nvidia, Microsoft, AWS, and Oracle. Notably absent from the group are all of the leading developers of frontier AI models such as Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI. “This is about getting the right data, and getting it clean, so that it can be used for AI,” Jeremy Rens…

SoundCloud is facing backlash after creators took to social media to complain upon discovering that the music-sharing platform uses uploaded music to train its AI systems. According to SoundCloud’s terms of use, unless a separate agreement states otherwise, users “explicitly agree that your Content may be used to inform, train, develop or serve as input to artificial intelligence or machine intelligence technologies or services as part of and for providing the services.” These terms appear to have been added to SoundCloud’s website in February 2024. Futurism was the first to report on artists’ concerns. Musical duo The Flight brought attention to the terms thi…

Yesterday was an eventful day for shareholders and employees of Intel Corp. The American chipmaker reported its Q1 2025 results while its new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, confirmed earlier reports that Intel would be laying off employees. Here’s what you need to know about those layoffs and the latest movement in Intel’s stock price. New Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan confirms job cuts The most devastating news to come out of Intel yesterday was that earlier reports were correct and the company would be laying off employees. On Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that Intel was preparing to lay off up to 20% of its current workforce. Given that Intel reported having 108,900 employees at t…

When Johnson & Johnson launched the first disposable diaper in 1948, it revolutionized modern parenting. But it also, unwittingly, created an environmental disaster. Diapers are largely made of plastic, which does not biodegrade, but breaks into microplastics that pollute our waterways and end up in our food chain. And yet, more than 300,000 diapers are thrown out every minute, bound for landfills or incinerators, and accelerating climate change. There’s now a movement to design a more eco-friendly diaper, from creating easier-to-use cloth diapering systems to diapers that use less plastic. But Hiro, a newly launched startup, may have the most creative solution yet. …

Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD has launched a sale of its Hong Kong shares to raise up to $5.2 billion via an accelerated book-building, according to a deal term sheet seen by Reuters on Monday. The company has set a price range of HK$333-HK$345 per share for the offering, representing an up to 8.4% discount compared to the stock’s market closing price of HK$363.60 on Monday. The offering is expected to be priced on Monday, the term sheet said. BYD did not immediately respond to a Reuters’ request for comment. The company plans to use the proceeds to invest in research and development, expand overseas businesses, supplement working capital, and for gen…

Ann Hummond knew the office software like the back of her hand. Based in Yorkshire, England, she could untangle any spreadsheet snafu in her sleep. Over the past 23 years, she had worked her way up from a data entry clerk to her finance company’s administrative director, quietly becoming the person everyone relied on when things went sideways. She was, in short, indispensable. And then, one Tuesday morning last year, during a quarterly team meeting attended by directors, colleagues, and a team leader, her boss—who is nearly 10 years her senior—told her publicly, in a roomful of people: “You’re too old to do this job.” “I must have looked like a goldfish…

The name Village Roadshow might not ring a bell with every moviegoer, but the company’s logo almost certainly will. Its shimmering, nested “V” of metallic ribbons that taper inward like a cinematic illusion played before dozens of movies that collectively spawned 34 No. 1 opening weekends, 19 Academy Awards, and $19 billion in worldwide box office gross. The veteran production house behind seismic hits like The Matrix, Ocean’s 11, and Mad Max: Fury Road has been delivering hits for decades, mostly through coproductions with Warner Bros. But last week, following a years-long decline in box office performance, the company filed for bankruptcy. How did a highly pedig…

Severance is the hit sci-fi show about office workers who “sever” their consciousness—slipping into another mode the moment they arrive at the office, then forgetting everything about their 9-to-5 as soon as they leave. The concept was inspired by the creator’s own monotonous desk job before he found success in television. Part of the show’s appeal lies in how familiar the premise feels: a dull, repetitive workday that people can’t wait to escape. In the real world, employees don’t have a mental switch to flip, but they’ve found subtler, and potentially more insidious, ways to disengage. The latest trend, dubbed “task-masking,” has taken over Instagram and TikTok. It’…

In the handful of years since generative AI became both a zeitgeist technology and common dinner table conversation topic, people across the design industries—ranging from independent graphic designers to tech executives—have landed on a curious mantra to justify its use: it’s just a tool. In this very publication, in 2023, designers Caspar Lam and Yujune Park, wrote that “if we see a designer’s role as communicating and connecting ideas to humans in meaningful ways, AI image-generation becomes another tool and avenue for creative expression.” This perspective is not unique to them. Josh Campo, the CEO of Razorfish, extolling the virtues of AI for creatives in Forbes…

Macy’s announced in its fourth-quarter and fiscal-year 2024 earnings report on Thursday that it expects another year of declining sales as the department store chain continues reshaping its footprint to focus on better-performing locations. The retailer projected fiscal 2025 sales between $21 billion and $21.4 billion, down from $22.3 billion last year—closely aligning with analyst expectations of $21.34 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. Macy’s net sales in the latest quarter fell 4.3% to $7.8 billion. Across the company’s brands—Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, and Bluemercury—comparable sales in the fourth quarter declined 1.1%. However, in owned and license…

A bitcoin investor who bought a SpaceX flight for himself and three polar explorers blasted off Monday night on the first rocket ride to carry people over the North and South poles. Chun Wang, a Chinese-born entrepreneur, hurtled into orbit from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. SpaceX’s Falcon rocket steered southward over the Atlantic, putting the space tourists on a path never flown before in 64 years of human spaceflight. Wang won’t say how much he paid Elon Musk’s SpaceX for the 3 ½-day ultimate polar adventure. The first leg of their flight—from Florida to the South Pole—took barely a half-hour. From the targeted altitude of some 270 miles (440 kilometers), their full…

Novo Nordisk announced Friday that it would part ways with its longtime CEO, who steered the company into an unprecedented boom time for weight loss drugs. The Ozempic maker’s chief executive Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen first joined the company as an economist in 1991. Jorgensen has served as Novo Nordisk’s CEO since 2017, leading the company before the current gold rush in weight loss drug development was imaginable. In a press release announcing the move, Novo Nordisk cited market challenges and its declining share price in a press release announcing the leadership shake up. Jorgensen will stay on as CEO temporarily for an undetermined period of time “to support…

As an app designed to facilitate gay hookups, popular site Sniffies has had a limitation since it started in 2018—it was only accessible via web browser. Until Monday, when the map-based cruising site debuted its Apple-approved iOS app. Building an app that complies with Apple’s notoriously stringent content moderation—and total ban on apps that directly serve adult content—was a challenge for Sniffies, which wears its sexuality proudly. Its users, which it calls “cruisers,” do, too. Many users put nude images as their cover photos, meaning adult content is visible from the second the platform is opened in a browser. The company needed to tame the experience for…

Most people think of urban open spaces in terms of grand parks—Chicago’s Millennium Park or New York’s Central Park or San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. These are our iconic parks—our sublime spaces. They serve as the “lungs” of our cities, and they certainly steal our hearts. These spaces are not locked behind gates but are stages where our own lives play out and memories are created, full of movement and reflection and joy. There are more modest spaces in our cities, though, that are just as important to our lives—the thresholds and courtyards and pocket parks. They’re the places where we bump into our neighbors to walk our dogs or read on a bench in an environment…

Donatella Versace has been replaced as creative director of the fashion house founded by her late brother Gianni Versace, assuming the new role of chief brand ambassador, Versace’s U.S. owner Capri Holdings announced on Thursday. Versace will be replaced by Dario Vitale, who most recently was design director at the Miu Miu brand owned by the Prada Group. His appointment is effective on April 1. The creative shift comes amid speculation that the Prada Group is in talks to buy Versace from Capri Holdings, which paid 2 billion euros (currently $2.2 billion) for the fashion house in 2018. The U.S. group also owns Michael Kors and Jimmy Choo. Miuccia Prada acknowledged inte…

What if extreme heat not only leaves you feeling exhausted but actually makes you age faster? Scientists already know that extreme heat increases the risk of heat stroke, cardiovascular disease, kidney dysfunction and even death. I see these effects often in my work as a researcher studying how environmental stressors influence the aging process. But until now, little research has explored how heat affects biological aging: the gradual deterioration of cells and tissues that increases the risk of age-related diseases. New research my team and I published in the journal Science Advances suggests that long-term exposure to extreme heat may speed up biological aging …

Workplace stress reached an all-time high in 2022, according to a Gallup report. And a 2022 Work and Well-Being Survey from the American Psychological Association found that workers appreciate and seek mental health support in the workplace. That’s why it’s important for employees to learn and practice techniques that will help them lower their stress during moments when stress levels are high. One way to do this is by creating positive experiences during highly stressful situations, such as recalling times when we were confident, calm, and in control. These serve as emotional anchors that we can trigger at will. In my book, Emotional Intelligence Game Changers: 101 S…

The Lyrid meteor shower is one of the most well-known stellar displays, occurring once a year in April. It’s also one of the oldest meteor showers that we know of, with records dating back to 687 BCE from Chinese astronomers. Unlike many meteor showers, the Lyrids are relatively short: In 2025, the event runs a little more than a week, from April 17 to April 26. It will peak in the nighttime hours of April 21 to 22. Typically, you can expect to see 10 to 20 meteors per hour at the peak, though the Lyrids have been known to outperform and deliver up to 100 meteors per hour. If you’d like to catch the show this year, here’s what to know about the 2025 Lyrids met…

Fast Company is the official media partner of Summit Detroit. At Summit events, unlikely pairings of innovative yet seemingly disconnected people regularly take the stage. In the past, Summit attendees have heard Kendrick Lamar and Quentin Tarantino discuss their creative processes; investor Brad Gerstner do a deep dive into Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi’s background and upbringing; and Al Gore and actor and entrepreneur Jaden Smith unite over their work combating the climate crisis. This signature feature of Summit events will be no different at Summit Detroit this June 5–8. “Summit becomes the conduit for all of these amazing intersections to happen,” says Sum…