Month: November 2021

Enlarge / The shareholder revolt comes in the shadow of recent cases and the revelation that co-founder Bill Gates had a relationship with a company employee. (credit: Jeff Pachoud | Getty Images)

Microsoft’s shareholders have backed a protest vote calling on the company to reveal more about its handling of sexual harassment claims, in the shadow of recent cases and the revelation that co-founder Bill Gates had a relationship with a company employee.

The call amounted to a rare vote against management at the company’s annual shareholder meeting and brought an immediate promise from Microsoft of more transparency. However, the company stopped short of saying it would reveal details about individual cases, and it did not make any commitment to reopen its handling of cases from previous years.

The shareholder revolt followed years of complaints from some workers that the company had brushed pervasive claims of harassment under the carpet. Arjuna Capital, which submitted the shareholder proposal challenging management, said Microsoft’s human resources department upheld only one claim against the group out of a total of 238 that were included in a class-action lawsuit alleging discrimination and harassment in 2012.

Enlarge / A Merck sign stands in front of the company's building on October 2, 2013, in Summit, New Jersey. (credit: Getty | Kena Betancur)

In a 13-to-10 vote, advisors for the Food and Drug Administration narrowly supported authorizing Merck's Thor-inspired antiviral pill molnupiravir for use against severe COVID-19.

The FDA's panel of advisors—the Antimicrobial Drugs Advisory Committee (AMDAC)—struggled in an all-day meeting Tuesday to weigh the drug's risks, its modest benefits, and the limited available data. The latest analysis suggests that the pill is only 30 percent effective at preventing hospitalization and death from COVID-19 in people at high risk of severe disease. Meanwhile, the drug has the worrisome potential to cause mutations, leading advisors to agonize over whether it should be offered to pregnant people.

Molnupiravir's final data and today's vote is a significant disappointment from the early fanfare around the drug, which initially promised to be an easy-to-use oral drug to effectively prevent severe COVID-19. "Our prediction from our in vitro studies and now with this data is that molnupiravir is named after the right [thing]... this is a hammer against SARS-CoV-2 regardless of the variant," Merck’s head of research and development, Dean Li, said last month.

Enlarge / 400,000 bots can't be wrong. (credit: Capcom)

Monday night at 11 pm EST, there were 18 players logged on and playing the Steam version of Capcom Arcade Stadium (according to SteamDB data sourced from the Steam store itself). Ten hours later, on Tuesday morning, the game peaked at over 488,000 concurrent players, putting it behind only perennial favorites Counter-Strike: GO and Dota 2 on Steam's list of most-played games for the day.

No, the idea of playing classic Capcom arcade games on the PC didn't get 27,000 times more popular literally overnight. Instead, the sudden "success" seems driven by automated bots taking advantage of an unexpected opportunity to score some "free" money by minting and selling Steam Trading Cards.

Steam Trading Cards explained

Since the launch of Steam Trading Cards in 2013, players have been able to earn, buy, and sell the purely digital collectibles in thousands of games on Valve's online platform. For most supported games, a player can get half of the available trading cards just by putting in playtime. To get a game's full card set, a player has to purchase the remainder from the Steam Community Market. There, other players can offer their excess cards for sale, with commodity pricing determined by floating buy and sell offers that fluctuate based on supply and demand.

Enlarge / This is Porsche's $131,400 Taycan GTS electric sedan, which goes on sale in the US in Q2 2022. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

LOS ANGELES—A few weeks ago, we sampled Porsche's newest 911 variant, the Carrera GTS. Automakers' naming conventions can be impenetrable to the casual observer, so in Porsche-speak, GTS stands for "Gran Turismo Sport." It's basically the "have your cake and eat it" model in the range, as it has more power and sharper handling than the standard car, but it's less powerful (and cheaper) than the Turbo or the more specialized GT-plus-a-number 911s.

But today, we'll be talking about Porche's Taycan, as the company has now applied the GTS treatment to the battery-electric vehicle. Anyone who has made the mistake of asking me what my favorite car is will know just how deep my feelings for the electric Porsche run, so when Porsche asked if we wanted to test a $131,400 2022 Taycan GTS on track at Willow Springs in California, it was an easy decision.

A GTS-badged Porsche is not a track car, but it needs to be able to perform on track if necessary. And it's probably less challenging to get an electric Taycan to cope with the track than a Macan or Cayenne SUV. (credit: Porsche)

Truth be told, Porsche hasn't done a ton of re-engineering work to create the Taycan GTS. The car uses the same front and rear drive units as the Taycan Turbo, but they're calibrated to produce less power. Launch control allows for bursts of 440 kW (590 hp) and a zero-to-60 time of 3.5 seconds. The rest of the time, the Taycan GTS has a nominal output of 380 kW (509 hp). Maximum torque, however, is identical to the Taycan Turbo at 849 Nm (626 lb-ft).

Enlarge / Itokawa, the original source of the dust grains examined in a new study. (credit: ISAS, JAXA)

About a decade ago, we were surprised to discover that there's a fair amount of water on the surface of the Moon. Given that the Moon has no atmosphere and receives enough solar radiation to boil any water off, how that water got there wasn't clear. One of the explanations offered up at the time was the solar wind that sends a steady stream of protons out in the the Solar System, and these could interact with lunar material to produce water.

Fast forward a decade, and we now have asteroid samples brought back to Earth by two different probes. Working with some of the material obtained by Japan's Hayabusa mission, researchers have found a thin, water-rich layer is present there, too, consistent with being put in place by the solar wind. The researchers behind the finding suggest that this means that many Solar System bodies are likely to be fairly water-rich—a reservoir that could have made a big contribution to Earth's oceans.

Only skin deep

The asteroid 25143 Itokawa was the target of the first successful sample-return mission to an asteroid. Itokawa is what's called a "rubble pile," made up of small fragments produced by collisions among asteroids, then slowly gathered together by gravity. Asteroids like this may have fragmented and re-formed multiple times over their history, and they could be composed of portions of more than one body.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images | The Tonight Show)

Three former Google software engineers who sued the company yesterday claim they were fired for following Google's famous "Don't be evil" mantra.

"Google terminated each plaintiffs' employment with it for adhering to the directive 'Don't be evil' and calling out activity by Google that they each believed betrayed that directive," according to the complaint filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court by Rebecca Rivers, Sophie Waldman, and Paul Duke. The ex-employees say Google falsely blamed them for a data leak after they circulated an internal petition.

The lawsuit notes that the Google Code of Conduct "that each full-time Google employee is required to sign as a condition of employment" specifically instructs them not to be evil. The ex-employees say they tried to uphold the "Don't be evil" policy in August 2019 by circulating a petition "requesting that Google affirm that it would not collaborate with CBP [US Customs and Border Protection] or ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] with respect to enforcement of the Trump border control policies."