Latest news with #TED
New York Post
11 hours ago
- New York Post
Arizona ICE agents posed as city workers to trick way into illegal immigrant's home, neighbors claim: ‘Should be a crime'
Possible Arizona immigration officials posed as city utility workers while attempting to detain an undocumented immigrant at his home, a witness to the altercation claims. Two men dressed as electric company workers turned up in a south Tucson neighborhood Wednesday morning and began asking residents if they knew a Honduran man who lived on the street for over a decade, the Arizona Daily Star reported. The men claimed to be from Tucson Electric Power (TED) and told neighbors they were trying to provide the man with city services he'd asked for, neighbor Christine Cariño told the outlet. Neighbor Christine Cariño claimed immigration officers disguised themselves as city workers to try to get into a home. 'He said, 'We're trying to find somebody that wanted a free estimate,'' claimed Cariño, who was watering her plants across the street. But she claimed the men were not wearing proper TED uniforms — one had a reflective work shirt and the other a black t-shirt — and became suspicious that the men weren't who they said they were as they pressed for information about her neighbor. Then when they turned towards the Honduran man's home she claimed to see a badge hidden under one of their shirts — and asked if they were from the Department of Homeland Security. 'He just smiled. So I took off running,' Cariño said. The men had by then been let into the Honduran man's yard across the street by his stepson, and Cariño started yelling at him not to let them in. 'Don't open the door, they don't have a warrant!' she was heard yelling in video from the incident, obtained by KGUN 9. 'They're lying, they're not in a uniform!' One of the men wore a reflective shirt to look like a city worker, video shows. KGUN Immigration officials aren't allowed to enter people's homes without consent from an occupant if they don't have a warrant — and Cariño claimed the individuals appeared to be faking their identity to trick their way into the man's home. Speaking through the home's door, the agents said the Honduran had missed immigration court dates, but he denied that and refused to come out. The family later corroborated Cariño's version of events to KGUN 9. It remains unclear whether the men Cariño encountered were from ICE, but a spokesperson for the agency told the Arizona Daily Star 'It's an ongoing investigation' while declining to comment on the allegations of impersonation. Such tactics have allegedly been used by immigration officials across the country in the past, according to the outlet, and have previously been called unconstitutional in a 2020 American Civil Liberties Union complaint out of California. That case is still pending. But Cariño thinks it should be illegal. 'That should be considered a crime, impersonating a company to try to remove somebody from a home,' she told the Arizona Daily Star. 'If he had a warrant, the situation would have been different. Do it the right way.' South Tucson's mayor agrees, and characterized Cariño's reaction as admirable. 'That lady is a hero,' Mayor Roxanna Valenzuela said. 'We need to protect each other. Now is not the time to be silent.'
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Viridian Therapeutics to Participate in Upcoming June Investor Conferences
WALTHAM, Mass., May 30, 2025--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Viridian Therapeutics, Inc. (Nasdaq: VRDN), a biopharmaceutical company focused on discovering, developing, and commercializing potential best-in-class medicines for serious and rare diseases, today announced that members of its management team will participate in the following upcoming investor conferences: Jefferies Global Healthcare Conference (New York, NY): Presentation on Wednesday, June 4, at 7:35am ET Goldman Sachs 46th Annual Global Healthcare Conference 2025 (Miami, FL): Presentation on Monday, June 9, 2025 at 8:40am ET A live webcast of each presentation can be accessed under "Events and Presentations" on the Investors section of the Viridian website at A replay of the webcasts will be available following the completion of the event. About Viridian Therapeutics Viridian is a biopharmaceutical company focused on discovering, developing and commercializing potential best-in-class medicines for patients with serious and rare diseases. Viridian's expertise in antibody discovery and protein engineering enables the development of differentiated therapeutic candidates for previously validated drug targets in commercially established disease areas. Viridian is advancing multiple candidates in the clinic for the treatment of patients with thyroid eye disease (TED). The company is conducting a pivotal program for veligrotug (VRDN-001), including two global phase 3 clinical trials (THRIVE and THRIVE-2), to evaluate its efficacy and safety in patients with active and chronic TED. Both THRIVE and THRIVE-2 reported positive topline data, meeting all the primary and secondary endpoints of each study. Viridian is also advancing VRDN-003 as a potential best-in-class subcutaneous therapy for the treatment of TED, including two ongoing global phase 3 pivotal clinical trials, REVEAL-1 and REVEAL-2, to evaluate the efficacy and safety of VRDN-003 in patients with active and chronic TED. In addition to its TED portfolio, Viridian is advancing a novel portfolio of neonatal Fc receptor (FcRn) inhibitors, including VRDN-006 and VRDN-008, which has the potential to be developed in multiple autoimmune diseases. Viridian is based in Waltham, Massachusetts. For more information, please visit Follow Viridian on LinkedIn and X. View source version on Contacts IR@ Media@ 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
Business Wire
3 days ago
- Business
- Business Wire
Viridian Therapeutics to Participate in Upcoming June Investor Conferences
WALTHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Viridian Therapeutics, Inc. (Nasdaq: VRDN), a biopharmaceutical company focused on discovering, developing, and commercializing potential best-in-class medicines for serious and rare diseases, today announced that members of its management team will participate in the following upcoming investor conferences: Jefferies Global Healthcare Conference (New York, NY): Presentation on Wednesday, June 4, at 7:35am ET Goldman Sachs 46th Annual Global Healthcare Conference 2025 (Miami, FL): Presentation on Monday, June 9, 2025 at 8:40am ET A live webcast of each presentation can be accessed under 'Events and Presentations' on the Investors section of the Viridian website at A replay of the webcasts will be available following the completion of the event. About Viridian Therapeutics Viridian is a biopharmaceutical company focused on discovering, developing and commercializing potential best-in-class medicines for patients with serious and rare diseases. Viridian's expertise in antibody discovery and protein engineering enables the development of differentiated therapeutic candidates for previously validated drug targets in commercially established disease areas. Viridian is advancing multiple candidates in the clinic for the treatment of patients with thyroid eye disease (TED). The company is conducting a pivotal program for veligrotug (VRDN-001), including two global phase 3 clinical trials (THRIVE and THRIVE-2), to evaluate its efficacy and safety in patients with active and chronic TED. Both THRIVE and THRIVE-2 reported positive topline data, meeting all the primary and secondary endpoints of each study. Viridian is also advancing VRDN-003 as a potential best-in-class subcutaneous therapy for the treatment of TED, including two ongoing global phase 3 pivotal clinical trials, REVEAL-1 and REVEAL-2, to evaluate the efficacy and safety of VRDN-003 in patients with active and chronic TED. In addition to its TED portfolio, Viridian is advancing a novel portfolio of neonatal Fc receptor (FcRn) inhibitors, including VRDN-006 and VRDN-008, which has the potential to be developed in multiple autoimmune diseases. Viridian is based in Waltham, Massachusetts. For more information, please visit Follow Viridian on LinkedIn and X.
Int'l Business Times
5 days ago
- Science
- Int'l Business Times
Speeding up mechanical simulations with AI
Photo of Chinmay-Shrivastava For five years, a single idea dominated Chinmay Shrivastava's thoughts: humans didn't have enough hours in the day to build the designs of the future. An avid lover of science fiction, Chinmay struggled to see how current mechanical engineering methods could build the starships that he dreamed would take him throughout the galaxy. While studying computational mechanics during his undergrad at IIT Roorkee, he watched a TED Talk in which Maurice Conti used AI to optimize a car chassis through millions of iterations. The resulting design outperformed what any human could have created alone. But real-world engineering doesn't work that way, yet. High-fidelity simulations take days, cost thousands, and require hours of expert setup. Engineers are limited in how often they can test and improve their designs. Immediately after watching that TED talk 5 years ago, Shrivastava began working on AI models to accelerate simulation, but the early approaches, CNNs and LSTMs, couldn't properly model nonlinear physics or generalize beyond their training data. He dreamed of a general model that could actually understand how physics affected 3D geometries. In 2024, Shrivastava met Noah Evers while working on early LLM reasoning research. They began combining recent breakthroughs in physics-based learning with the paradigm of large-scale pretraining proven by ChatGPT. Their goal: to build a foundation model that could run complex mechanical simulations in seconds and extrapolate to new geometries, materials, and physical conditions. Today, CompLabs is developing this model with leading aerospace, automotive, and manufacturing companies. These organizations regularly run simulations that take days and cost thousands of dollars. CompLabs' model replicates the performance of an organization's existing simulation software, but in a version that runs in seconds, enabling engineers to explore broader design spaces faster and find better designs. These companies plan to use our model to test thousands of design permutations, like optimizing material and geometry combinations for thermal performance, compressing months of work into hours. A technical and personal mission Shrivastava's path to this problem was shaped by both expertise and personal pain. At 14, he suffered a severe reaction to carbon soot during Diwali. "I was coughing up blood," he recalls. "My hands and feet were covered in ulcers. I couldn't eat solid food for two weeks." He learned that carbon soot was a byproduct of design and manufacturing inefficiency and resolved to do something about it. This led him to study mechanical engineering. "We waste energy everywhere," he explains. "Airplanes and cars burn more fuel than they need. Industrial systems—from HVAC to manufacturing equipment—are overdesigned and underoptimized. Everything is energy. And every bit of excess—fuel, material, or heat— translates into carbon. That carbon harms the planet." After his carbon soot incident, he left home to become an engineer, studying in isolation for two years and attending IIT Roorkee and later Brown, where he worked on finite-element solvers, soft materials, and AI systems. From speeding up simulation to intelligent design CompLabs raised $2.65 million in pre-seed funding from Alt Capital, Cory Levy, and Joris Poort (Founder of Rescale). It's focused on building a new infrastructure layer for mechanical designs: one that uses foundation models to speed up simulations and reason about design trade-offs. "We're not replacing solvers. Solvers serve the essential role of structurally approximating physics. We're just approximating these solvers in a more computationally efficient form." But a model that understands geometries and how they're affected by physics has implications beyond simulation. It can autonomously improve designs and understand high-level concepts like manufacturability without relying on low-level heuristics. It can serve as a bridge between experimental results and numerical solvers, calibrating models to real-world data and even predicting system-level behavior (like force-response curves or failure modes) directly from shapes. CompLabs hopes to use AI to supercharge the capabilities of mechanical engineers. As Shrivastava puts it, "Mechanical engineering used to be glorious: steam engines, railways, airplanes, putting a man on the moon. Engineers were national heroes. But then software ate the world, and we lost that. The times are changing. From SpaceX to Anduril, hardware is cool again. We're going to put datacenters in space, robots in the home, and fly on supersonic jets. AI is going to help us do that. We want to usher in a new golden age of mechanical engineering."
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
If Ted Talks are getting shorter, what does that say about our attention spans?
Name: Ted Talks Age: Ted started in 1984. And has Ted been talking ever since? Ted – short for Technology, Entertainment, Design – is an American-Canadian non-profit media organisation that has an annual conference … I know, and they do the inspirational online talks. Correct, under the slogan 'Ideas change everything'. Anyway, what about them? They're shorter. The talks? Than what? Than before. How much shorter? Six minutes. Says who? Says Elif Shafak. The Turkish-British novelist? Novelist, essayist, public speaker, activist. She was talking at the Hay festival, in Wales. What did she say? That when she first did a Ted Talk she was given a limit of 19 minutes, but a decade later she was told to keep it to a trim 13. Why? That's what she asked Ted. And Ted said? According to Shafak, TED said: 'Well, the world's average attention span has shrunk.' How did that make her feel? 'Really sad. We are incapable of listening to a talk for more than a few minutes.' She went on to say that it was because we are living 'in an age of hyper-information'. Too much to take in? Exactly. 'We cannot process this much information,' she continued. 'And in the long run it makes us tired, demoralised, then numb because we stop caring.' My god, sounds terminal. Is it true, that our attention spans have shrunk? A lack of long-term studies means we don't know for sure, but the public seems to think it has. Tell me more. But get on with it. A study by King's College London in 2022 found that 49% of people believe their attention spans have become shorter, 50% say they can't stop checking their phones … Young people probably. Nope. Also a struggle for the middle-aged. And 50% of people also believed – wrongly – that the average attention span for adults today is just eight seconds. Sorry, what were we talking about again? Short attention spans. Oh yes. I knew that. What about books though, are they getting shorter too? Well, interestingly, a 2015 study suggested the opposite, that they were 25% longer than they were 15 years earlier. I'm sensing there's a but coming. But the longlist for this year's International Booker includes eight books that are less than 200 pages. What about films, they're definitely getting longer, right? The short answer: no. Slightly longer answer: again, we just think they are, probably because of marketing. Studios want to incentivise people to spend money on a ticket, which they do by telling you it's big, epic and special. Hang on, so we think attention is going down but it might not be, and films are getting longer, but they're not? Very perceptive. Someone should do a Ted Talk about it. Do say: 'Can you even change everything in 13 minutes?' Don't say: 'Hurry up, you're losing the room.'
