5 injured in ambulance crash in Minooka, Illinois
Five people were injured when an ambulance crashed and rolled over on its side Friday afternoon in southwest suburban Minooka, Illinois.
Kendall County Sheriff's officials said a Minooka Fire Protection District ambulance and another vehicle crashed around 3 p.m. near the intersection of Ridge and Wildy roads.
The ambulance ended up on its side.
Four people in the ambulance and one person from the other vehicle were taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
The road was closed for about an hour after the crash, but has since reopened.
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Yahoo
20 minutes ago
- Yahoo
At least 9 children have died in a hot car in the U.S. this year. Why this happens, according to experts.
Nine children have died in hot cars across the U.S. so far this year. In March, a 4-month-old who was supposed to be dropped off at a babysitter's home in New Jersey was forgotten in a minivan for two hours. On Sunday, a 4-year-old was found inside a hot car after being reported missing in Georgia. It's a preventable tragedy that makes dozens of headlines every spring and summer. Nearly 40 children die in hot cars each year, according to data compiled by Kids and Car Safety, a national nonprofit that fights for child safety in and around vehicles. Since 1990, more than 1,000 kids have died from overheating in a car somewhere in the U.S. In 2024, 39 kids died in hot cars, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), down from 2018 and 2019, when a record-breaking 53 children died in hot cars. Excluding car crashes, heatstroke is the leading cause of death in vehicles for children 14 and younger. The majority of hot car deaths happen because the driver forgets the child is in the car, according to the NHTSA. The federal agency has found that 47% of these deaths happen when the caregiver has forgotten to drop those children off at day care or school, and it usually happens at the end of the workweek, on Thursdays or Fridays. The second leading cause is when unsupervised children get into unattended vehicles on their own. 'The majority of parents and caregivers are misinformed and would like to believe that they could never 'forget' their child in a vehicle,' Kids and Car Safety notes. 'The most dangerous mistake a parent or caregiver can make is to think leaving a child alone in a vehicle could never happen to them or their family.' Children who get trapped in cars suffer from pediatric vehicular heatstroke, which happens when the child's body temperature rises because of the internal temperature of a car. For example, if the outside temperature is around 70°F, the inside of a car's temperature will increase to over 100°F within the first 30 minutes. A child's body will overheat three to five times faster than an adult's body, according to the Columbia University Irving Medical Center. More often than not, caregivers leave children in hot cars by accident, which is why they're usually not charged with murder, David Diamond, a psychology professor at the University of South Florida, told Yahoo News. Diamond has studied cases of children dying in hot cars for 20 years. 'These are not parents who don't care about their kids,' Diamond said. 'Everyone can relate to forgetting. It's something that we all do.' Diamond says parents leave their kids in overheating cars because of habit and routine. The 'habit brain memory system' kicks in when people perform repetitive tasks almost automatically or without a second thought. Diamond has said that knowing how to ride a bike or tie shoelaces are examples of habit brain memory. 'You're driving home from work, and you've done it hundreds of times by yourself,' Diamond explained to Yahoo News. 'It's your brain's habit memory system that takes you from work to home without even having to think about it. You drive straight home.' Even if parents feel confident that they will remember their child is in the back seat and needs to be dropped off somewhere before they get to the office, the habit brain memory system can overpower that new addition to a routine they've done hundreds of times without the child, Diamond said. He emphasized this is not a 'syndrome' or rare mental disorder, but something most people experience because it's how the brain functions. It does not mean the parent or caregiver doesn't love their child. ''Forgetting' really is the right word,' he said of situations where parents leave their kids in hot cars. But 'forgetting' the child because of routine doesn't alleviate any severity or pain from the experience for those parents. 'It truly is a form of forgetting. And that's as simple as it is. It is a catastrophe." Creating relevant safety laws is crucial to helping parents protect their children in these situations, Amber Rollins, director of Kids and Car Safety, told Yahoo News. Rollins cited data dating back to 1990 that shows children died less frequently from airbags while sitting in the front seat of a car after states made it illegal for kids under 13 to ride in the passenger seat. (It also wasn't required in all states for kids to ride in car seats until 1985.) But as more children were placed in the back seats of cars to avoid airbag deaths, kids were instead dying of heatstroke because they were forgotten in the car. This is why groups like Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, Safe Kids Worldwide, the Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association and Kids and Car Safety are advocating for it to be mandatory for car manufacturers to build in radar systems that help notify parents if their kids are still sitting in the back seat. Part of the argument for why radar should be built into the cars — instead of tools parents can order online and install themselves — is, as Diamond told Yahoo News, because most people do not believe they would ever forget their child in the back seat of the car and wouldn't buy it. 'The best kind of solution available right now is radar detection,' Rollins said. 'It's a little chip that goes into the headliner or the roof of the vehicle, and it detects micro-movements … it can tell the difference between an adult and a child based on micro-movements … and so, effectively, it can tell, 'Hey, there's a kid in here, and I don't see a grown-up, we've got a problem.'' Kids and Car Safety coordinated with members of Congress on the federal Hot Cars Act, which was passed by the House of Representatives in 2021. The act then evolved into a provision under the Child Safety section in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which was signed into law in November 2021. The provision requires that the Secretary of Transportation 'issue a rule that requires all new passenger motor vehicles to be equipped with a child safety alert system 'not later than 2 years after the date of enactment of this section,' which would have been December 2023. A spokesperson for the NHTSA told Yahoo News that the organization is still conducting studies to ensure that the radar devices currently available are actually effective. But, according to Rollins, the NHTSA has not made enough effort to put this rule into effect across all car manufacturers. Some tools, such as end-of-trip detectors and rear occupant alerts, which use sensors and are built into some cars already, are not as accurate as radar detection, Rollins said. A concern is that if the technology is faulty and alerts parents over every small thing in the back of their car, parents might feel inclined to turn it off, Rollins said. Rollins argued that there are existing radar detection devices that have passed multiple tests and should be installed. The technology needs to exclusively flag if children are unattended in the back of a car. (Some Genesis, Volvo, Toyota and Hyundai cars do have radar detectors installed.) 'The agency will continue to test additional systems as they become available to the public,' the NHTSA spokesperson said. It's common for parents to believe they would never forget their children in the back seat of their car. Here are some tips from Sanford Health on how to ensure you remember your child is in the back. Put something in the back seat of your car with your child that you need before leaving the vehicle, like a cell phone, one of your shoes or an employee badge — something you need when you arrive at your destination. Keep a stuffed animal in your child's car seat and move it to the front of the car while driving your child as a reminder that they are in the car with you. Ask your babysitter or child care provider to give you a call if your child is expected to show up somewhere but hasn't arrived. Always check that your car is locked and inspect it before leaving the premises — even if you're in a rush. This can help you double-check nobody is in the back seat and addresses the second cause of children dying in hot cars, which is when they climb in unattended and unsupervised. Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated that NHTSA was involved in the Hot Cars Act.
Forbes
20 minutes ago
- Forbes
Why Reliability Is The Hardest Problem In Physical AI
Dr. Jeff Mahler: Co-Founder, Chief Technology Officer, Ambi Robotics; PhD in AI and Robotics from UC Berkeley. getty Imagine your morning commute. You exit the highway and tap the brakes, but nothing happens. The car won't slow down. You frantically search for a safe place to coast, heart pounding, hoping to avoid a crash. Even after the brakes are repaired, would you trust that car again? Trust, once broken, is hard to regain. When it comes to physical products like cars, appliances or robots, reliability is everything. It's how we come to count on them for our jobs, well-being or lives. As with vehicles, reliability is critical to the success of AI-driven robots, from the supply chain to factories to our homes. While the stakes may not always be life-or-death, dependability still shapes how we trust robots, from delivering packages before the holidays to cleaning the house just in time for a dinner party. Yet despite the massive potential of AI in the physical world, reliability remains a grand challenge for the field. Three key factors make this particularly hard and point to where solutions might emerge. 1. Not all failures are equal. Digital AI products like ChatGPT make frequent mistakes, yet hundreds of millions of active users use them. The key difference is that these mistakes are usually of low consequence. Coding assistants might suggest a software API that doesn't exist, but this error will likely be caught early in testing. Such errors are annoying but permissible. In contrast, if a robot AI makes a mistake, it can cause irreversible damage. The consequences range from breaking a beloved item at home to causing serious injuries. In principle, physical AI could learn to avoid critical failures with sufficient training data. In practice, however, these failures can be extremely rare and may need to occur many times before AI learns to avoid them. 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For example, when a Waymo autonomous vehicle encounters an unfamiliar situation on the road, it can ask a human operator for additional information to understand its environment. However, it's not as clear how to intervene in every application. When possible, a powerful solution is to use a hybrid AI robot planning system. The AI can be tightly scoped to specific decisions such as where to grasp an item, and traditional methods can be used to plan a path to reach that point. As noted above, this is limited and won't work in cases where there is no traditional method to solve the problem. Intervention and fallback systems are key to ensuring reliability with commercial robots today and in the foreseeable future. Conclusion Despite rapid advances in digital GenAI, there's no obvious path to highly reliable physical AI. It isn't just a technical hurdle; it's the foundation for trust in intelligent machines. Solving it will require new approaches to data gathering, architectures for monitoring/interventions and systems thinking. As capabilities grow, however, so does momentum. The path is difficult, but the destination is worth it. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
Yahoo
28 minutes ago
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Tesla fires VP of manufacturing Omead Afshar amid declining EV sales
June 26 (UPI) -- Tesla CEO Elon Musk fired the carmaker's vice president of manufacturing and operations following a falloff in auto sales in the nation's largest markets this year. Omead Afshar oversaw more than six upper-level employees in the company, including Troy Jones, Tesla's vice president of sales in North America, and Joe Ward, vice president of the Europe, Middle East and Africa region. The firing was first reported by Bloomberg News. Afshar is the second high-level employee to leave the company recently. His termination follows the resignation of Milan Kovac, who was the company's head of its Optimus humanoid robotics program. Kovac said in a post on X that he was leaving Tesla to spend more time with his family. Musk later thanked Kovac publicly for his time with the company. In 2022, Afshar was the subject of an internal investigation at Tesla that focused on his involvement in trying to secure construction materials for a secret project for Musk that included hard-to-get glass. Prior to his job as Tesla vice president, Afshar worked for SpaceX, Musk's aerospace company. Afshar's X account, which had not been updated, said he still works for Tesla, and he praised Musk for his leadership and work ethic following the launch of the company's Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas. "Thank you, Elon, for pushing us all," Afshar wrote. Tesla's stock price has dropped 19% this year, and took an especially hard hit following Musk's association with President Donald Trump, who appointed Musk to oversee the Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE took a broad and aggressive approach to eliminating federal employees, downsizing federal agencies and ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs at some of the nation's largest companies and universities. The company sold fewer cars in 2024 than it did in 2023, the first time sales dropped since Tesla began mass producing EVs. Its profits fell 71% in the first quarter of 2025. European sales dropped 28%, and dropped for a fifth straight month in May. The European Automobile Manufacturers Association said buyers are shifting to cheaper Chinese models. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
