Womp, womp: Efficacy of Merck’s Thor-inspired COVID pill crumbles, vexing experts

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.

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Why hundreds of thousands of bots decended on one Steam arcade collection

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.

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The 2022 Porsche Taycan GTS first drive

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

Porsche provided flights to Los Angeles and two nights in a hotel so we could drive the Taycan GTS and another variant you'll be able to read about in two weeks. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

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).

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Asteroid-sample return turns up water on its rocks’ surface

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.

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Lawsuit: Google employees were fired for upholding “Don’t be evil” code

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."

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Labor board orders a do-over in Amazon warehouse union election

Enlarge / An Amazon warehouse in Germany on April 2, 2020. (credit: Patrick Pleul | picture alliance | Getty Images)

A regional official at the National Labor Relations Board has called for a new union election at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama, fulfillment center following recommendations issued in August by a hearing officer. The Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which seeks to represent workers in the Bessemer warehouse, filed 23 objections disputing the fairness of the election shortly after votes were tallied back in April. 

No date has been set for the new election, and Amazon could still appeal the decision to the full National Labor Relations Board.

The decision to call a new election hinges primarily on a mailbox that Amazon installed in the warehouse’s parking lot to collect ballots. According to the NLRB's report (PDF), the mailbox was installed without the approval of the NRLB, creating the impression that the box was being surveilled and that Amazon, not the NLRB, was conducting the election. Amazon also installed a tent over the mailbox with Amazon’s anti-union campaign messaging “printed on at least one side,” and the company conducted “mandatory small group meetings” where it provided anti-union campaign materials to employees.

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Users revolt as Microsoft bolts a short-term financing app onto Edge

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Microsoft is taking a lot of flak for planning to integrate a short-term financing app into the company’s Edge browser. The app would allow users to make purchases immediately and pay for them at a future date.

In recent years, Edge has built a following of users attracted to the security of the Microsoft browser, in addition to features including immersive reading, collections (which saves webpages or notes to categorized notebooks), vertical tabs, and the ability to take screenshots directly from a webpage.

​​Two weeks ago, Microsoft said it planned to bake an app called Zip directly into Edge. The so-called “buy now, pay later” app, which used to be known as Quadpay, lets shoppers break purchases into equal installment payments so they get their merchandise upfront, rather than having to wait until it’s paid in full. It didn’t take long for the howling and gnashing of teeth to begin.

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UK orders Facebook to sell Giphy, rejects Meta’s proposed merger conditions

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Anadolu Agency )

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) today ordered Facebook owner Meta to sell Giphy, saying the merger "would reduce competition between social media platforms and that the deal has already removed Giphy as a potential challenger in the display advertising market."

Facebook bought Giphy in May 2020 for a reported $400 million "but has been required to hold the businesses separate" since June 2020, when the CMA imposed an Initial Enforcement Order (IEO), the UK government body said in a summary of its final report today. After the 17-month investigation, "we have decided that the only effective way to address the competition issues that we have identified is for Facebook to sell Giphy, in its entirety, to a suitable buyer," the CMA wrote.

The CMA said it found that "Facebook would be able to increase its already significant market power in relation to other social media platforms by denying or limiting other platforms' access to Giphy GIFs, driving more traffic to Facebook-owned sites—Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram—which already account for 73 percent of user time spent on social media in the UK" and by "changing the terms of access by, for example, requiring TikTok, Twitter, and Snapchat to provide more user data in order to access Giphy GIFs."

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Holmes recounts sexual, emotional abuse by Theranos exec Balwani

Enlarge / Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos Inc., arrives at federal court in San Jose, Calif., on Tuesday, November 23, 2021.

In a day of intense and emotional testimony, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes told the court of the sexual, physical, and emotional abuse she said she suffered at the hands of company president and chief operating officer Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani and others.

Balwani was Holmes’ boyfriend for more than a decade, much of it during their time leading Theranos, the failed blood-testing startup. The pair hid their relationship from investors and Theranos employees. Balwani has pleaded not guilty to the same fraud and conspiracy charges Holmes faces. His trial begins next year.

Holmes’ attorneys said she met Balwani in 2002 on a language-immersion trip in China. She was 18 years old at the time and a senior in high school. He was in his late 30s and pursuing an MBA at the University of California, Berkeley.

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Sonos app leaks unannounced miniature subwoofer

Enlarge / A tinier, rounder version of this? (credit: Sonos)

Small spaces often mean small sound. If you're like me and live in a cramped apartment, there's just not a lot of room for bulky speakers and surround sound systems. A potentially upcoming offering from Sonos could be the ticket for providing powerful audio through a small device.

The product in question is the Sonos Sub Mini. Sonos hasn't announced it, and it's not on the audio company's website. However, as reported by Android Police yesterday, someone on the Sonos subreddit reportedly spotted the name while using the Sonos app.

"As I was adding my second sub to my system, I noticed the 'more information' button, clicked it, and was taken to this page within the app," the Reddit user, u/S114HED, posted Saturday, along with this screenshot:

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