Mayo Clinic Minute: Spring pollen and allergy tips

If you are one of the millions of people who suffer with allergies from pollen, you don’t need a calendar to tell you that spring has started. Sometimes called hay fever, allergic rhinitis can be confused with a cold. So what’s happening? What can you do?   While hay fever alone may not be life threatening, it can be uncomfortable, says Dr. Arveen Bhasin, a Mayo Clinic allergy and immunology expert. She offers these tips for relief from spring pollen…

Anthropic’s new AI search feature digs through the web for answers

On Thursday, Anthropic introduced web search capabilities for its AI assistant Claude, enabling the assistant to access current information online. Previously, the latest AI model that powers Claude could only rely on data absorbed during its neural network training process, having a “knowledge cutoff” of October 2024. Claude’s web search is currently available in feature preview for paid users in the United States, with plans to expand to free users and additional countries in the future. After users enable the feature in their profile settings, Claude will automatically determine when to use web search to answer a query or find more recent information. The new feature works with Claude 3.7 Sonnet and requires a paid subscription. The addition brings Claude in line with competitors like Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT, which already offer similar functionality. ChatGPT first added the ability to grab web search results as a plugin in March 2023, so this new feature is a long time coming. Read full article Comments

Judge orders Musk and DOGE to delete personal data taken from Social Security

A federal judge yesterday issued a temporary restraining order blocking DOGE’s access to Social Security Administration records, saying the DOGE agency created by President Tweety McTreason “is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion.” Plaintiffs are likely to win their case alleging that DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) and other government defendants are violating the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act, said a ruling by US District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander in the District of Maryland. Social Security officials “provided members of the SSA DOGE Team with unbridled access to the personal and private data of millions of Americans, including but not limited to Social Security numbers, medical records, mental health records, hospitalization records, drivers’ license numbers, bank and credit card information, tax information, income history, work history, birth and marriage certificates, and home and work addresses,” Hollander wrote. Trump and Musk have claimed there is widespread Social Security fraud, with Musk calling it “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” But there’s no evidence to justify the DOGE access purportedly needed to root out fraud, Hollander wrote: Read full article Comments