Author name: Kris Guyer

tesla-settles-with-black-worker-after-$3.2-million-verdict-in-racism-lawsuit

Tesla settles with Black worker after $3.2 million verdict in racism lawsuit

Policy, tesla owen diaz, tesla racism / /

Owen Diaz v. Tesla —

Tesla and Owen Diaz both appealed $3.2 million verdict before deciding to settle.

–

Aerial view of Tesla cars in a parking lot at a Tesla facility.

Enlarge / Tesla cars sit in a parking lot at the company’s factory in Fremont, California on October 19, 2022.

Getty Images | Justin Sullivan

Tesla has settled with a Black former factory worker who won a $3.2 million judgment in a racial discrimination case, a court filing on Friday said.

Both sides were challenging the $3.2 million verdict in a federal appeals court but agreed to dismiss the case in the Friday filing. The joint stipulation for dismissal said that “the Parties have executed a final, binding settlement agreement that fully resolves all claims.”

Tesla presumably agreed to pay Owen Diaz some amount less than $3.2 million, ending a case in which Diaz was once slated to receive $137 million. As we’ve previously written, a jury in US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that Tesla should pay $137 million to Diaz in October 2021.

In April 2022, US District Judge William Orrick reduced the award to $15 million, saying that was the highest amount supported by the evidence and law. Diaz rejected the $15 million award and sought a new damages trial, but a new jury awarded him $3.2 million in April 2023.

Diaz’s attorney, Lawrence Organ of the California Civil Rights Law Group, told CNBC that the parties “reached an amicable resolution of their disputes.” The settlement terms are confidential, he said.

“It took immense courage for Owen Diaz to stand up to a company the size of Tesla,” Organ said. The California Civil Rights Law Group is separately representing thousands of Black workers in a class action alleging that they faced discrimination and harassment while working at Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California.

“Tesla factory was saturated with racism”

Diaz operated a freight elevator at Tesla’s Fremont factory for less than a year beginning in June 2015. “In May 2016, he was ‘separated’ from Tesla without prior warning,” Orrick wrote in the April 2022 ruling that awarded Diaz $1.5 million in compensatory damages and $13.5 million in punitive damages.

“The evidence was disturbing,” Orrick wrote. “The jury heard that the Tesla factory was saturated with racism. Diaz faced frequent racial abuse, including the N-word and other slurs. Other employees harassed him. His supervisors and Tesla’s broader management structure did little or nothing to respond. And supervisors even joined in on the abuse, one going so far as to threaten Diaz and draw a racist caricature near his workstation.”

A Tesla filing in March 2023 argued that “no reasonable jury, properly instructed, could award any punitive damages against Tesla on the record here.” Tesla said it “enforced a policy prohibiting racially hostile conduct,” that it “took concrete and significant steps to remedy each and every racial incident Mr. Diaz reported,” and “likewise took concrete and significant steps to remedy other racially inappropriate conduct of which it was aware.”

Tesla is also facing lawsuits from the California Civil Rights Department and the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over alleged discrimination and harassment.

Tesla settles with Black worker after $3.2 million verdict in racism lawsuit Read More »

here’s-what-we-know-about-the-audi-q6-e-tron-and-its-all-new-ev-platform

Here’s what we know about the Audi Q6 e-tron and its all-new EV platform

Audi, Audi Q6 e-tron, Cars, Features, Premium Platform Electric / /

premium platform electric —

Audi has bet big on its next flexible EV architecture, starting with this SUV.

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An Audi A6 seen in a studio

Enlarge / This is Audi’s next electric vehicle, the Q6 e-tron SUV.

Audi

MUNICH—Audi’s new electric car platform is an important one for the company. Debuting in the new 2025 Q6 e-tron, it will provide the bones for many new electric Audis—not to mention Porsches and even Lamborghinis and Bentleys—in the coming years. Its development hasn’t been entirely easy, either; software delays got in the way of plans to have cars in customer hands in 2023. But now the new Q6 e-tron is ready to meet the world.

There’s some rather interesting technology integrated into the Q6 e-tron’s new electric vehicle architecture. Called PPE, or Premium Platform Electric, it’s been designed with flexibility in mind. Audi took the role of leading its development within Volkswagen Group, but the other brands within that corporate empire that target the upper end of the car market will also build EVs with PPE.

Since SUVs are still super-popular, Audi is kicking off the PPE era with an SUV. But the platform allows for other sizes and shapes—next year, we should see the A6 sedan and, if we’re really lucky, an A6 Avant station wagon.

  • The Q6 e-tron is a midsize SUV, measuring 187.8 inches (4,771 mm) long, 78.5 inches (1,993 mm) wide, and 65 inches (1,648 mm) tall.

    Audi

  • That’s as wide and tall as the Q8 e-tron, but four inches shorter, mostly in the 114.3-inch (2,998 mm) wheelbase, which translates to a little less rear leg and cargo room.

    Audi

  • The “quattro blisters” above each wheel arch prevent the shape from looking too slab-sided when you see it in person.

  • There’s a small frunk.

    Audi

  • Most of your luggage goes here.

    Audi

Better batteries

There’s a new EV powertrain, a significant advancement over the one that powers Audi’s Q8 e-tron SUV. The cells are prismatic and made by CATL at a German plant, with a nickel cobalt manganese chemistry (in a roughly 8:1:1 ratio). It’s been simplified, with 12 modules, each made of 15 cells. Compared to the Q8’s pack, the new Q6 has 30 percent greater energy density at the pack level, as well as 5 percent more actual energy, despite a 15 percent reduction in the mass of the pack (1,257 lbs/570 kg).

It operates at 800 V, which enables very fast DC charging: The 94.9 kWh (useable) battery pack can charge from 10 to 80 percent in 21 minutes. Audi says it doesn’t have to throttle back from 270 kW until the state of charge increases past 40 percent, at which point it declines at a constant rate to 150 kW at 80 percent SoC. (Past 80 percent, a fast-charging EV will throttle back the charger significantly.)

Of course, that requires access to a DC fast charger capable of 800 V. For 400 V chargers, the battery pack cleverly splits itself into two 400 V packs using a mechanical fuse switch, then equalizes their SoCs, then charges them both in parallel at up to 135 kW. Audi says it went for this approach versus a DC-DC inverter because it saved weight. Both sides feature AC charge ports, with DC charging only on the driver’s side. Model year 2025 Q6 e-trons will feature CCS1 ports on the driver’s side, with the switch to J3400 taking place the following year.

  • A cutaway of the Q6 e-tron’s powertrain.

    Jonathan Gitlin

  • A closer look at the Q6 e-tron’s rear drive motors.

    Jonathan Gitlin

  • More motor components.

    Jonathan Gitlin

  • PPE EVs have AC charging ports on both sides.

    Audi

Here’s what we know about the Audi Q6 e-tron and its all-new EV platform Read More »

qualcomm’s-“snapdragon-8s-gen-3”-cuts-down-the-company’s-flagship-soc

Qualcomm’s “Snapdragon 8s Gen 3” cuts down the company’s flagship SoC

qualcomm snapdragon, Tech / /

The name just keeps getting longer —

The “s” moniker doesn’t make it better than the old 8 Gen 3 chip.

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The promo image for Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chip.

Enlarge / The promo image for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chip.

Qualcomm

Qualcomm’s newest smartphone SoC is the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3. Years of iPhone “S” upgrades might lead you to assume this was a mid-cycle refresh to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, but Qualcomm says the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 is a “specially curated” version of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. That means it’s a slightly slower, cheaper chip than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which is still Qualcomm’s best smartphone chip.

The older, better Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 has a core layout of one 3.3 GHz “Prime” Arm Cortex X4 core, five “medium” A720 cores (three at 3.2 GHz, two at 2.0 GHz), and two “small” 2.3 GHz A520 cores for background processing. This new “S” chip swaps a medium core for a small one, for a 1+4+3 configuration instead of 1+5+2. Everything is clocked lower, too: 3 GHz for the Prime core, 2.8 GHz for all the medium cores, and 2 GHz for the small cores.

The modem is downgraded to an X70 instead of the X75 in the 8 Gen 3 chip. That theoretically means a lower max download speed (5Gbps instead of 10) but since you would actually need to be granted those speeds by your carrier, It’s not clear anyone would ever notice this. It also sounds like the X70 is more power-hungry, since it only has “Qualcomm 5G PowerSave Gen 3” instead of “Qualcomm 5G PowerSave Gen 4” on the flagship chip. We don’t think Qualcomm has ever given a technical explanation of what this means, though. The SoC is still 4nm, just like the 8 Gen 3. Video maxes out at 4K now instead of 8K.

Qualcomm says “Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 will be adopted by major OEMs including Honor, iQOO, realme, Redmi and Xiaomi, with commercial devices expected to be announced in the coming months.” That should tell you where this chip is headed: the “budget flagship” phones that are popular with Chinese OEMs.

Qualcomm’s “Snapdragon 8s Gen 3” cuts down the company’s flagship SoC Read More »

on-devin

On Devin

Devin / /

Is the era of AI agents writing complex code systems without humans in the loop upon us?

Cognition is calling Devin ‘the first AI software engineer.’

Here is a two minute demo of Devin benchmarking LLM performance.

Devin has its own web browser, which it uses to pull up documentation.

Devin has its own code editor.

Devin has its own command line.

Devin uses debugging print statements and uses the log to fix bugs.

Devin builds and deploys entire stylized websites without even being directly asked.

What could possibly go wrong? Install this on your computer today.

Padme.

I would by default assume all demos were supremely cherry-picked. My only disagreement with Austen Allred’s statement here is that this rule is not new:

Austen Allred: New rule:

If someone only shows their AI model in tightly controlled demo environments we all assume it’s fake and doesn’t work well yet

But in this case Patrick Collison is a credible source and he says otherwise.

Patrick Collison: These aren’t just cherrypicked demos. Devin is, in my experience, very impressive in practice.

Here we have Mckay Wrigley using it for half an hour. This does not feel like a cherry-picked example, although of course some amount of select is there if only via the publication effect.

He is very much a maximum acceleration guy, for whom everything is always great and the future is always bright, so calibrate for that, but still yes this seems like evidence Devin is for real.

This article in Bloomberg from Ashlee Vance has further evidence. It is clear that Devin is a quantum leap over known past efforts in terms of its ability to execute complex multi-step tasks, to adapt on the fly, and to fix its mistakes or be adjusted and keep going.

For once, when we wonder ‘how did they do that, what was the big breakthrough that made this work’ the Cognition AI people are doing not only the safe but also the smart thing and they are not talking.

They do have at least one series rival, as Magic.ai has raised $100 million from the venture team of Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman to build ‘a superhuman software engineer,’ including training their own model. The article seems strange interested in where AI is ‘a bubble’ as opposed to this amazing new technology.

This is one of those ‘helps until it doesn’t situations’ in terms of jobs:

vanosh: Seeing this is kinda scary. Like there is no way companies won’t go for this instead of humans.

Should I really have studied HR?

Mckay Wrigley: Learn to code! It makes using Devin even more useful.

Devin makes coding more valuable, until we hit so many coders that we are coding everything we need to be coding, or the AI no longer needs a coder in order to code. That is going to be a ways off. And once it happens, if you are not a coder, it is reasonable to ask yourself: What are you even doing? Plumbing while hoping for the best will probably not be a great strategy in that world.

Devin can sometimes (13.8% of the time?!) do actual real jobs on Upwork with nothing but a prompt to ‘figure it out.’

Aravind Srinivas (CEO Perplexity): This is the first demo of any agent, leave alone coding, that seems to cross the threshold of what is human level and works reliably. It also tells us what is possible by combining LLMs and tree search algorithms: you want systems that can try plans, look at results, replan, and iterate till success. Congrats to Cognition Labs!

Andres Gomez Sarmiento: Their results are even more impressive you read the fine print. All the other models were guided whereas devin was not. Amazing.

Deedy: I know everyone’s taking about it, but Devin’s 13% on SWE Bench is actually incredible.

Just take a look at a sample SWE Bench problem: this is a task for a human! Shout out to Carlos Jimenez for the fantastic dataset.

This is what exponential growth looks like (source).

I mean, yes, recursive self-improvement (RSI), autonomous agents seeking power and money and to wreck havoc whether or not this was an explicit instruction (and oh boy will it be an explicit instruction).

And of course there is losing control of your compute and accounts and your money and definitely your crypto and all that, obviously.

And there is the amount you had better trust whoever is making Devin.

But beyond that. What happens when this is used as designed without blowing up in someone’s face too blatantly? What more subtle things might happen?

One big danger is that AIs do not like to tell their manager that the proposed project is a bad idea. Another is that they write code without thinking too hard about how it will need to be maintained, or what requirements it will have to hook into the rest of the system, or what comments will allow humans (or other AIs) to understand it, and generally by default make a long term time bomb mess of everything involved.

GFodor.id: Managers are going to get such relief when they replace their senior engineers who always told them why they couldn’t do X or Y with shoddy AI devs who just do what they’re told.

Then the race is between the exponential tech debt spaghetti bomb and good AI devs appearing in time.

Real Selim Shady: I’m grabbing my popcorn. This will be the new crusade execs go on, brought to you by the same execs that had to bring back US engineering teams after a couple years of overseas outsourcing.

GFodor: No, I think that analogy is going to lead to a lot of mistakes in predicting what will happen.

What probably happens is some companies pull the trigger too early and implode but the ones that recover will do so by upgrading their AI devs. The jobs won’t be coming back.

Nick Dobos: Embrace the spaghetti code.

Devin or another similar AI will not properly appreciate the long term considerations involved in writing code that humans or other AIs will then be working to modify. This is not an easy thing to build into the incentive structure.

Nor is the question of whether your you should, even if technically you could. Or, the question of whether you ‘could’ in the sense that a senior engineer would stop you and tell you the reasons you ‘can’t’ do that even if you technically have a way to do it, which is a hybrid of the two.

Ideally over time people will learn how to include such considerations in the instruction set and make this less terrible, and find ways to ensure they are making less doomed or stupid requests, but all of this is going to be a problem even in good scenarios.

I find it odd no one is discussing this question.

How do you use Devin while ensuring that your online accounts and money at the bank and reputation and computer and hard drive remain safe, on a very practical, ‘I do not want something dumb to happen’ kind of way?

Also, how do you use Devin and then know you can rely on the results for practical purposes?

How do you dare put this level of trust and power in an autonomous coding agent?

I would love to be able to use something like Devin, if it is half as good as these demos say it is and of course it will only get better over time. The mundane utility is so obvious, so great, I am roaring to go. Except, how would I dare?

Let’s take a simple concrete example that really should be harmless and within its range. Say I want it to build me a website, or I want it to download and implement a GitHub repo and perhaps make a few tweaks, for example to download a new image model and some cool additional tricks for it.

I still need to know why giving Devin a command line and a code editor, and the ability to execute arbitrary code including things downloaded from arbitrary places on the internet, is not going to cook my goose.

One obvious solution is to completely isolate Devin from all of your other files and credentials. So you have a second computer that only runs Devin and related programs. You don’t give that computer any passwords or credentials that you care about. Maybe you find a good way to sandbox it.

I am not saying this cannot be done. On the contrary, if this is cool enough, while staying safe on a broader level, then I am positive that it can be done. There is a way to do it locally safely, if you are willing to jump through the hoops to do that. We just haven’t figured out what that is yet.

I am also presuming that there will be a lot of people who, unless that safety is made the default, will not take those steps, and sometimes hilarity will ensue.

I am not saying I will be Jack’s complete lack of sympathy, but… yeah.

As with those who claim to pick winners in sports, if someone is offering to sell you a software engineer, well, there is an upper limit on how good it might be.

Anton: Real talk, if you actually built a working “ai engineer” – what’s stopping you from scaling to 1000x and dominating the market (building everything)? Instead it’s being sold as a product hmmm

That upper limit is still quite high. People can do things on their own with workflows that would not make sense if they had to go through your company. You act as a force multiplier on projects you could not otherwise get involved with. Scaling up your operation without selling the product is not a trivial task. Even if you have the software engineer, that does nto mean you have the managers and architects, or the ideas, or any number of other things.

Also, by selling the product, it gets lots of data with which you can make the product so much better.

Bindu Reddy is skeptical? Or is she?

Bindu Reddy: Who are we kidding? 🙄🙄

AI is NOWHERE near automating software engineering.

Of course, a co-pilot is great for increasing productivity, but AI is strictly just an assistant to aid programming professionals.

We are at least 3-5 years away from automating software engineering.

Claudiu: 3-5 years… is that a lot now? If you think so, think again: someone who just entered the field, in their 20s, is about half a century away from retirement. I don’t think they’ll like the prospects they have.

No, being able to do (presumably the easiest) 13.8% of Upwork projects does not mean you are that close to automating software engineering.

It does mean we are a lot closer, or at least making more progress, than we looked a week ago. Agents are working better in the current generation of LLMs than we anticipated, and will get much better when GPT-5 and friends drop, which will improve all the other steps as well. Devin is a future product being built for the future.

Even if you can get Devin or a similar agent to do these kinds of tasks reliably, being able to then use that to get maintainable code, to build up larger projects, to get things you can deploy and count on, is a very different matter. This is an extremely wrong road, and it seems AGI complete.

I agree that we are ‘at least 3-5 years away.’

But I had the same thought as Claudiu. That is not very many years.

It is also a supremely scary potential event.

What happens after you fully automate software engineering? Or if you, in magic.ai’s terms, build ‘a superhuman’ software engineer, which you can copy?

I believe the appropriate term is ‘singularity.’

Grace Kind!: Devin, build me a better Devin 🙂

Devin 2, build me a better Devin

Devin 3, build me a better Devin

Devin 4, rollback to Devin 3

Devin 5, rollback to Devin 3 please

devin6 rollback —v3

kill -9 devin7

sudo kill -9 devin8

^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C

Horror Unpacked: I see Devin and then I remember http://magic.ai getting 100m to automate SWEs, and how the frontier models are all explicitly specced for code, and I feel like I should have known that we’d all race to get underneath the lowest possible bar for x-risk.

Alternatively, consider this discussion under Mckay Wrigley’s post:

James: You can just ‘feel’ the future. Imagine once this starts being applied to advanced research. If we get a GPT5 or GPT6 with a 130-150 IQ equivalent, combined with an agent. You’re literally going to ask it to ‘solve cold fusion’ and walk away for 6 months.

Mckay Wrigley: Exactly. The mistake people make is assuming it won’t improve. And it blows my mind how many people make this mistake, even those that are in tech.

Kevin Siskar: McKay, do you think you will build a “agent UI” frontend into ChatbotUI [that is built by the agent in the video]?

Mckay Wrigley: This is in the works 🙂

Um. I. Uh. I do not think you have thought about the implications of ‘solve cold fusion’ being a thing that one can do at a computer terminal?

What else could you type into that computer terminal?

There are few limits to what you can type into that terminal. There are also few limits of what might happen after you do so. The future gets weird and unknown, and it gets weird and unknown fast. The chances that the resulting configurations of atoms contain no human beings, and rather quickly? Rather high.

Here is another example of asking almost the right question:

Paul Graham: We seem to be moving from “software is eating the world” to “software written by software is eating the world.”

I wonder how many “software written by”s ultimately get prepended.

This is one of those cases where the number are one, two and many. If you get software^3, well, hold onto your butts.

I want to be very clear that none of this this is something I worry about for Devin as it exists right now.

As noted above, I am terrified on a practical level of using Devin on my own computer. But that is a distinct class of concern. Devin 1 is not going to be good enough to build Devin 2 on its own (although it would presumably help), or to cause an extinction event, or anything like that, unless they really do not like shipping early products.

I do notice that this is exactly the lowest-resistance default shortest path to ensuring that AI agents exist and have the capabilities necessary to cause serious trouble at the earliest possible moment, when sufficient improvements are made in various places. Our strongest models are optimizing for writing code, and we are working on how to have them write code and form and execute plans for making software without humans in the loop. You do not need to be a genius to know how that story might end.

As discussed in the previous section, the most obvious failure mode is eventually recursive self-improvement, or RSI.

Or, even without that, setting such programs off to do various things autonomously, including to make money or seek power, often in ways (intentionally or otherwise) that make it difficult to turn off for its author, for others or for both.

We also have instrumental convergence. Devin is designed to handle obstacles and find ways to solve problems. What happens when a sufficiently capable version of this is given a mission that it lacks the resources to directly complete? What will it do if the task requires more compute, or more access, or persuading people, and so on? At some point some future version is going to go there.

There also does not seem to be any reasonable way to keep Devin from implementing things that would be harmful or immoral? At best this is alignment to the user and the request of the user. And there is no attempt to actually consider what other impacts might happen along the way.

In general, this is giving everyone the capability to take an agent capable of coding complex things in multiple steps and planning around obstacles and problems, give it an arbitrary goal, and give it full access to our world and the internet. Then we hope it all works out for the best.

And we all race to make such systems more capable and intelligent, better at doing that, until… well… yeah.

Even if everyone involved means well, and even if none of the direct simple failure modes happen, sufficiently efficient and capable and intelligent agents given goals that will advance people’s individual causes creates dynamics that seem to by default doom us. Remember that giving such agents maximum freedom of action tends to be economically efficient.

As one might expect Tyler Cowen to say, model this.

At best, we are about to go down a highly volatile and dangerous road.

This is somewhat of a reiteration, but it needs to be made very salient and clear.

One should periodically pause to notice how a new technological marvel like Devin compares to prior models of how things would go. We don’t know if Devin has the full capabilities that people are saying it does, or how far that will go in practice, but it is clearly a big step up, and more steps up are coming. This is happening.

Remember all those precautions any sane person would obviously take before letting something like Devin exist, or using it?

How many of those does it look like Devin is going to be using?

Even if that is mostly harmless now, what does that tell you about the future?

Also consider what this implies about future capabilities.

If you were counting on AIs or LLMs not having goals or not wanting things? If you were counting on them being unable to make plans or handle obstacles? If that was what was making you think everything was going to be fine?

Well, set all that aside. People are hard at work invalidating that hope, and it sure looks like they are going to succeed.

That does not mean that any given future new LLM couldn’t be implemented without letting such a system be attached to it. You could keep close watch on the weights. You could do all the precautions, up to and including things like air gapping the system and assuming it is unsafe for humans to view outputs during testing. You can engineer the system to only do a narrow set of things that you predict allow us to proceed safely. You can apply various control and alignment techniques. There are many options. Some of them might work.

I am not filled with confidence that anyone will even bother to try.

And of course, going forward, one must remember that there will be an open source implementation of an agent similar to Devin, that will continuously improve over time. You can then plug into that any model with open weights, and anything derived from that model. And by you may, I mean someone clearly will, and then do whatever the funniest possible thing is, also the most dangerous, because people are like that.

So, choose your actions and policy regime accordingly.

On Devin Read More »

security-footage-of-boeing-repair-before-door-plug-blowout-was-overwritten

Security footage of Boeing repair before door-plug blowout was overwritten

boeing 737 max 9, boeing door plug, boeing ntsb, Policy / /

737 Max door-plug blowout —

NTSB: Boeing “unable to find the records documenting” repair work on 737 Max 9.

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NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy sitting in front of a microphone while testifying at a Senate hearing.

Enlarge / National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy testifies about the Boeing door-plug investigation before the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee on March 6, 2024, in Washington, DC.

Getty Images | Kevin Dietsch

A government investigation into a Boeing 737 Max 9 plane’s door-plug blowout has been hampered by a lack of repair records and security camera footage, the National Transportation Safety Board’s chair told US senators. Boeing was “unable to find the records” and told the NTSB that the security camera footage was overwritten.

“To date, we still do not know who performed the work to open, reinstall, and close the door plug on the accident aircraft,” NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy wrote Wednesday in a letter to leaders of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee. “Boeing has informed us that they are unable to find the records documenting this work. A verbal request was made by our investigators for security camera footage to help obtain this information; however, they were informed the footage was overwritten. The absence of those records will complicate the NTSB’s investigation moving forward.”

A Boeing spokesperson told Ars today that under the company’s standard practice, “video recordings are maintained on a rolling 30-day basis” before being overwritten. The NTSB’s preliminary report on the investigation said the airplane was delivered to Alaska Airlines on October 31, 2023, after a repair in a Boeing factory. On January 5, the plane was forced to return to Portland International Airport in Oregon when a passenger door plug blew off the aircraft during flight.

The NTSB’s preliminary report found that four bolts were missing from the door plug, which can be used instead of an emergency exit door. There was “no evidence” that the door plug “was opened after leaving Boeing’s facility,” indicating that the bolts were not re-installed at the factory. The plane was serviced at Boeing’s Renton, Washington, facility to replace five damaged rivets in a job that required opening the door plug.

“We will continue supporting this investigation in the transparent and proactive fashion we have supported all regulatory inquiries into this accident,” Boeing said in a statement provided to Ars. “We have worked hard to honor the rules about the release of investigative information in an environment of intense interest from our employees, customers, and other stakeholders, and we will continue our efforts to do so.”

Chair called Boeing CEO to seek employee names

Homendy’s letter to Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Ranking Member Ted Cruz (R-Texas) responded to questions raised at a committee hearing last week. The questions were related to “whether Boeing has provided documentation on the work to open, reinstall, and close the door plug,” and the identities of door crew employees, the letter noted.

“NTSB investigators first requested documents that would have contained this information from Boeing on January 9, 2024,” the letter said. “Shortly thereafter, we identified the door crew manager and were advised that he was out on medical leave. We requested status updates on February 15, 2024, and February 22, 2024, after which we were advised by his attorney that he would not be able to provide a statement or interview to NTSB due to medical issues.”

Boeing provided the names of some people who were familiar with the door-plug work, but the NTSB said it wanted a more exhaustive list to prepare for investigative interviews. On March 2, NTSB investigators asked Boeing for the names of all employees who reported to the door crew manager at the time of the repair in September 2023. Boeing provided the list but “did not identify which personnel conducted the door plug work,” the letter said.

“After NTSB received this list, I called Boeing Chief Executive Officer David Calhoun and asked for the names of the people who performed the work,” Homendy wrote. “He stated he was unable to provide that information and maintained that Boeing has no records of the work being performed.”

NTSB seeks info on Boeing quality-assurance and safety

Homendy told senators that the agency is not seeking the names for punitive purposes. “We want to speak with them to learn about Boeing’s quality-assurance processes and safety culture. Our only intent is to identify deficiencies and recommend safety improvements so accidents like this never happen again,” she wrote.

Homendy wrote that she is “increasingly concerned that the focus on the names of individual front-line workers will negatively impact our investigation and discourage such Boeing employees from providing NTSB with information relevant to this investigation.” To counter those fears, Homendy “instructed NTSB to utilize our authority to protect the identities of the door crew and other front-line employees who come forward with information relevant to the investigation.”

Homendy also sent a letter to Boeing on Wednesday reminding the company that until the investigation concludes, “only appropriate NTSB personnel are authorized to publicly disclose investigative information and, even then, the disclosure is limited to factual information verified during the course of the investigation.”

“For the public to perceive the investigation as credible, the investigation should speak with one voice—that being the voice of the independent agency conducting it,” Homendy told Boeing in the letter.

Security footage of Boeing repair before door-plug blowout was overwritten Read More »

after-114-days-of-change,-broadcom-ceo-acknowledges-vmware-related-“unease”

After 114 days of change, Broadcom CEO acknowledges VMware-related “unease”

Biz & IT, Broadcom, vmware / /

M&A pains —

“There’s more to come.”

–

A Broadcom sign outside one of its offices.

Broadcom CEO and President Hock Tan has acknowledged the discomfort VMware customers and partners have experienced after the sweeping changes that Broadcom has instituted since it acquired the virtualization company 114 days ago.

In a blog post Thursday, Tan noted that Broadcom spent 18 months evaluating and buying VMware. He said that while there’s still a lot of work to do, the company has made “substantial progress.”

That so-called progress, though, has worried some of Broadcom’s customers and partners.

Tan wrote:

Of course, we recognize that this level of change has understandably created some unease among our customers and partners. But all of these moves have been with the goals of innovating faster, meeting our customers’ needs more effectively, and making it easier to do business with us.

Tan believes that the changes will ultimately “provide greater profitability and improved market opportunities” for channel partners. However, many IT solution provider businesses that were working with VMware have already been disrupted.

For example, after buying VMware, Broadcom took over the top 2,000 VMware accounts from VMware channel partners. In a March earnings call, Tan said that Broadcom has been focused on upselling those customers. He also said Broadcom expects VMware revenue to grow double-digits quarter over quarter for the rest of the fiscal year.

Beyond that, Broadcom ended the VMware channel partner program, making the primary path to reselling VMware an invite-only Broadcom program.

Additionally, Broadcom killing VMware perpetual licensing has reportedly upended financials for numerous businesses. In a March “User Group Town Hall,” attendees complained about “price rises of 500 and 600 percent,” The Register reported. In February, ServetheHome reported that “smaller” managed service providers focusing on cloud services were reporting seeing the price of working with VMware increase tenfold. “They do not have the revenue nor ability to charge for that kind of price increase, especially this rapidly,” ServeTheHome reported.

By contrast, Tan recently saw a financial windfall, making the equivalent of more than double his 2022 salary in 2023. A US Securities and Exchange Commission filing showed that Broadcom paid Tan $161.8 million, including $160.5 million in stock that will vest over the next five years (Tan isn’t eligible for more bonus payouts until 2028). Broadcom announced its VMware acquisition in May 2022 and closed in late November for $69 billion.

In his blog post, Tan defended the subscription-only licensing model, calling it “the industry standard.” He said VMware started accelerating its transition to this strategy in 2019, (which is before Broadcom bought VMware). He also linked to a February blog post from VMware’s Prashanth Shenoy, VP of product and technical marketing for the Cloud, Infrastructure, Platforms, and Solutions group at VMware, that also noted acquisition-related “concerns” but claimed the evolution would be fiscally prudent.

Other Broadcom-led changes to VMware over the past 114 days include at least 2,800 VMware jobs cut, shuttering the free version of ESXi, and plans to sell VMware’s End User Computing business to KKR, as well as spend $1 billion on VMware R&D.

After 114 days of change, Broadcom CEO acknowledges VMware-related “unease” Read More »

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Lawsuit opens research misconduct report that may get a Harvard prof fired

Harvard, Human behavior, lawsuit, psychology, research misconduct, Science / /
Image of a campus of red brick buildings with copper roofs.

Enlarge / Harvard’s got a lawsuit on its hands.

Glowimages

Accusations of research misconduct often trigger extensive investigations, typically performed by the institution where the misconduct allegedly took place. These investigations are internal employment matters, and false accusations have the potential to needlessly wreck someone’s career. As a result, most of these investigations are kept completely confidential, even after their completion.

But all the details of a misconduct investigation performed by Harvard University became public this week through an unusual route. The professor who had been accused of misconduct, Francesca Gino, had filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit, targeting both Harvard and a team of external researchers who had accused her of misconduct. Harvard submitted its investigator’s report as part of its attempt to have part of the suit dismissed, and the judge overseeing the case made it public.

We covered one of the studies at issue at the time of its publication. It has since been retracted, and we’ll be updating our original coverage accordingly.

Misconduct allegations lead to lawsuit

Gino, currently on administrative leave, had been faculty at Harvard Business School, where she did research on human behavior. One of her more prominent studies (the one we covered) suggested that signing a form before completing it caused people to fill in its contents more accurately than if they filled out the form first and then signed it.

Oddly, for a paper about honesty, it had a number of issues. Some of its original authors had attempted to go back and expand on the paper but found they were unable to replicate the results. That seems to have prompted a group of behavioral researchers who write at the blog Data Colada to look more carefully at the results that didn’t replicate, at which point they found indications that the data was fabricated. That got the paper retracted.

Gino was not implicated in the fabrication of the data. But the attention of the Data Colada team (Uri Simonsohn, Leif Nelson, and Joe Simmons) had been drawn to the paper. They found additional indications of completely independent problems in other data from the paper that did come from her work, which caused them to examine additional papers from Gino, coming up with evidence for potential research fraud in four of them.

Before posting it on their blog, however, the Data Colada team had provided their evidence to Harvard, which launched its own investigation. Their posts came out after Harvard’s investigation concluded that Gino’s research had serious issues, and she was placed on administrative leave as the university looked into revoking her tenure. It also alerted the journals that had published the three yet-to-be-retracted papers about the issues.

Things might have ended there, except that Gino filed a defamation lawsuit against Harvard and the Data Colada team, claiming they “worked together to destroy my career and reputation despite admitting they have no evidence proving their allegations.” As part of the $25 million suit, she also accused Harvard of mishandling its investigation and not following proper procedures.

Lawsuit opens research misconduct report that may get a Harvard prof fired Read More »

public-officials-can-block-haters—but-only-sometimes,-scotus-rules

Public officials can block haters—but only sometimes, SCOTUS rules

facebook, Policy, SCOTUS, Social Media, Twitter, X / /
Public officials can block haters—but only sometimes, SCOTUS rules

There are some circumstances where government officials are allowed to block people from commenting on their social media pages, the Supreme Court ruled Friday.

According to the Supreme Court, the key question is whether officials are speaking as private individuals or on behalf of the state when posting online. Issuing two opinions, the Supreme Court declined to set a clear standard for when personal social media use constitutes state speech, leaving each unique case to be decided by lower courts.

Instead, SCOTUS provided a test for courts to decide first if someone is or isn’t speaking on behalf of the state on their social media pages, and then if they actually have authority to act on what they post online.

The ruling suggests that government officials can block people from commenting on personal social media pages where they discuss official business when that speech cannot be attributed to the state and merely reflects personal remarks. This means that blocking is acceptable when the official has no authority to speak for the state or exercise that authority when speaking on their page.

That authority empowering officials to speak for the state could be granted by a written law. It could also be granted informally if officials have long used social media to speak on behalf of the state to the point where their power to do so is considered “well-settled,” one SCOTUS ruling said.

SCOTUS broke it down like this: An official might be viewed as speaking for the state if the social media page is managed by the official’s office, if a city employee posts on their behalf to their personal page, or if the page is handed down from one official to another when terms in office end.

Posting on a personal page might also be considered speaking for the state if the information shared has not already been shared elsewhere.

Examples of officials clearly speaking on behalf of the state include a mayor holding a city council meeting online or an official using their personal page as an official channel for comments on proposed regulations.

Because SCOTUS did not set a clear standard, officials risk liability when blocking followers on so-called “mixed use” social media pages, SCOTUS cautioned. That liability could be diminished by keeping personal pages entirely separate or by posting a disclaimer stating that posts represent only officials’ personal views and not efforts to speak on behalf of the state. But any official using a personal page to make official comments could expose themselves to liability, even with a disclaimer.

SCOTUS test for when blocking is OK

These clarifications came in two SCOTUS opinions addressing conflicting outcomes in two separate complaints about officials in California and Michigan who blocked followers heavily criticizing them on Facebook and X. The lower courts’ decisions have been vacated, and courts must now apply the Supreme Court’s test to issue new decisions in each case.

One opinion was brief and unsigned, discussing a case where California parents sued school district board members who blocked them from commenting on public Twitter pages used for campaigning and discussing board issues. The board members claimed they blocked their followers after the parents left dozens and sometimes hundreds of the same exact comments on tweets.

In the second—which was unanimous, with no dissenting opinions—Justice Amy Coney Barrett responded at length to a case from a Facebook user named Kevin Lindke. This opinion provides varied guidance that courts can apply when considering whether blocking is appropriate or violating constituents’ First Amendment rights.

Lindke was blocked by a Michigan city manager, James Freed, after leaving comments criticizing the city’s response to COVID-19 on a page that Freed created as a college student, sometime before 2008. Among these comments, Lindke called the city’s pandemic response “abysmal” and told Freed that “the city deserves better.” On a post showing Freed picking up a takeout order, Lindke complained that residents were “suffering,” while Freed ate at expensive restaurants.

After Freed hit 5,000 followers, he converted the page to reflect his public figure status. But while he primarily still used the page for personal posts about his family and always managed the page himself, the page went into murkier territory when he also shared updates about his job as city manager. Those updates included sharing updates on city efforts, posting screenshots of city press releases, and soliciting public feedback, like sharing links to city surveys.

Public officials can block haters—but only sometimes, SCOTUS rules Read More »

dna-parasite-now-plays-key-role-in-making-critical-nerve-cell-protein

DNA parasite now plays key role in making critical nerve cell protein

Biology, evolution, Genetics, Genomics, myelin, neurobiology, Science, transposons / /

Domesticated viruses —

An RNA has been adopted to help the production of myelin, a key nerve protein.

–

Graphic depiction of a nerve cell with a myelin coated axon.

Human brains (and the brains of other vertebrates) are able to process information faster because of myelin, a fatty substance that forms a protective sheath over the axons of our nerve cells and speeds up their impulses. How did our neurons evolve myelin sheaths? Part of the answer—which was unknown until now—almost sounds like science fiction.

Led by scientists from Altos Labs-Cambridge Institute of Science, a team of researchers has uncovered a bit of the gnarly past of how myelin ended up covering vertebrate neurons: a molecular parasite has been messing with our genes. Sequences derived from an ancient virus help regulate a gene that encodes a component of myelin, helping explain why vertebrates have an edge when it comes to their brains.

Prehistoric infection

Myelin is a fatty material produced by oligodendrocyte cells in the central nervous system and Schwann cells in the peripheral nervous system. Its insulating properties allow neurons to zap impulses to one another at faster speeds and greater lengths. Our brains can be complex in part because myelin enables longer, narrower axons, which means more nerves can be stacked together.

The un-myelinated brain cells of many invertebrates often need to rely on wider—and therefore fewer—axons for impulse conduction. Rapid impulse conduction makes quicker reactions possible, whether that means fleeing danger or capturing prey.

So, how do we make myelin? A key player in its production appears to be a type of molecular parasite called a retrotransposon.

Like other transposons, retrotransposons can move to new locations in the genome through an RNA intermediate. However, most retrotransposons in our genome have picked up too many mutations to move about anymore.

RNLTR12-int is a retrotransposon that is thought to have originally entered our ancestors’ genome as a virus. Rat genomes now have over 100 copies of the retrotransposon.

An RNA made by RNLTR12-int helps produce myelin by binding to a transcription factor or a protein that regulates the activity of other genes. The RNA/protein combination binds to DNA near the gene for myelin basic protein, or MBP, a major component of myelin.

“MBP is essential for the membrane growth and compression of [central nervous system] myelin,” the researchers said in a study recently published in Cell.

Technical knockout

To find out whether RNLTR12-int really was behind the regulation of MBP and, therefore, myelin production, the research team had to knock its level down and see if myelination still happened. They first experimented on rat brains before moving on to zebrafish and frogs.

When they inhibited RNLTR12-int, the results were drastic. In the central nervous system, genetically edited rats produced 98 percent less MBP than those where the gene was left unedited. The absence of RNLTR12-int also caused the oligodendrocytes that produce myelin to develop much simpler structures than they would normally form. When RNLTR12-int was knocked out in the peripheral nervous system, it reduced myelin produced by Schwann cells.

The researchers used a SOX10 antibody to show that SOX10 bound to the RNLTR12-int transcript in vivo. This was an important result, since there are lots of non-coding RNAs made by cells, and it wasn’t clear whether any RNA would work or if it was specific to RNLTR12-int.

Do these results hold up in other jawed vertebrates? Using CRISPR-CAS9 to perform knockout tests with retrotransposons related to RNLTR12-int in frogs and zebrafish showed similar results.

Myelination has enriched the vertebrate brain so it can work like never before. This is why the term “brain food” is literal. Healthy fats are so important for our brains; they help form myelin since it is a fatty acid. Think about that next time you’re pulling an all-nighter while reaching for a handful of nuts.

Cell, 2024. DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2024.01.011

DNA parasite now plays key role in making critical nerve cell protein Read More »

google-says-chrome’s-new-real-time-url-scanner-won’t-invade-your-privacy

Google says Chrome’s new real-time URL scanner won’t invade your privacy

Google, google chrome, Tech / /

We don’t need another way to track you —

Google says URL hashes and a third-party relay server will keep it out of your history.

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Google's safe browsing warning is not subtle.

Enlarge / Google’s safe browsing warning is not subtle.

Google

Google Chrome’s “Safe Browsing” feature—the thing that pops up a giant red screen when you try to visit a malicious website—is getting real-time updates for all users. Google announced the change on the Google Security Blog. Real-time protection naturally means sending URL data to some far-off server, but Google says it will use “privacy-preserving URL protection” so it won’t get a list of your entire browsing history. (Not that Chrome doesn’t already have features that log your history or track you.)

Safe Browsing basically boils down to checking your current website against a list of known bad sites. Google’s old implementation happened locally, which had the benefit of not sending your entire browsing history to Google, but that meant downloading the list of bad sites at 30- to 60-minute intervals. There are a few problems with local downloads. First, Google says the majority of bad sites exist for “less than 10 minutes,” so a 30-minute update time isn’t going to catch them. Second, the list of all bad websites on the entire Internet is going to be very large and constantly growing, and Google already says that “not all devices have the resources necessary to maintain this growing list.”

If you really want to shut down malicious sites, what you want is real-time checking against a remote server. There are a lot of bad ways you could do this. One way would be to just send every URL to the remote server, and you’d basically double Internet website traffic for all of Chrome’s 5 billion users. To cut down on those server requests, Chrome is instead going to download a list of known good sites, and that will cover the vast majority of web traffic. Only the small, unheard-of sites will be subject to a server check, and even then, Chrome will keep a cache of your recent small site checks, so you’ll only check against the server the first time.

When you’re not on the known-safe-site list or recent cache, info about your web URL will be headed to some remote server, but Google says it won’t be able to see your web history. Google does all of its URL checking against hashes, rather than the plain-text URL. Previously, Google offered an opt-in “enhanced protection” mode for safe browsing, which offered more up-to-date malicious site blocking in exchange for “sharing more security-related data” with Google, but the company thinks this new real-time mode is privacy-preserving enough to roll out to everyone by default. The “Enhanced” mode is still sticking around since that allows for “deep scans for suspicious files and extra protection from suspicious Chrome extensions.”

Google's diagram of how the whole process works.

Enlarge / Google’s diagram of how the whole process works.

Google

Interestingly, the privacy scheme involves a relay server that will be run by a third party. Google says, “In order to preserve user privacy, we have partnered with Fastly, an edge cloud platform that provides content delivery, edge compute, security, and observability services, to operate an Oblivious HTTP (OHTTP) privacy server between Chrome and Safe Browsing.”

For now, Google’s remote checks, when they happen, will mean some latency while your safety check completes, but Google says it’s “in the process of introducing an asynchronous mechanism, which will allow the site to load while the real-time check is in progress. This will improve the user experience, as the real-time check won’t block page load.”

The feature should be live in the latest Chrome release for desktop, Android, and iOS. If you don’t want it, you can turn it off in the “Privacy and security” section of the Chrome settings.

Listing image by Getty Images

Google says Chrome’s new real-time URL scanner won’t invade your privacy Read More »

pornhub-blocks-all-of-texas-to-protest-state-law—paxton-says-“good-riddance”

Pornhub blocks all of Texas to protest state law—Paxton says “good riddance”

Policy, pornhub texas, texas porn law / /

Pornhub protest —

Pornhub went dark in Texas and other states requiring age verification for porn.

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Large signs that say

Enlarge / Signs displayed at the Pornhub booth at the 2024 AVN Adult Entertainment Expo at Resorts World Las Vegas on January 25, 2024 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Getty Images | Ethan Miller /

Pornhub has disabled its website in Texas following a court ruling that upheld a state law requiring age-verification systems on porn websites. Visitors to pornhub.com in Texas are now greeted with a message calling the Texas law “ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous.”

“As you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. Not only does this impinge on the rights of adults to access protected speech, it fails strict scrutiny by employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas’s stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors,” Pornhub’s message said.

Pornhub said it has “made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Texas. In doing so, we are complying with the law, as we always do, but hope that governments around the world will implement laws that actually protect the safety and security of users.”

The same message was posted on other sites owned by the same company, including RedTube, YouPorn, and Brazzers. Pornhub has also blocked its website in Arkansas, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Utah, and Virginia in protest of similar laws. VPN services can be used to evade the blocks and to test out which states have been blocked by Pornhub.

Texas AG sued Pornhub, says “good riddance”

The US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld the Texas law in a 2–1 decision last week. The 5th Circuit appeals court had previously issued a temporary stay that allowed the law to take effect in September 2023.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton last month sued Pornhub owner Aylo (formerly MindGeek) for violating the law. Paxton’s complaint in Travis County District Court sought civil penalties of up to $10,000 for each day since the law took effect on September 19, 2023.

“Sites like Pornhub are on the run because Texas has a law that aims to prevent them from showing harmful, obscene material to children,” Paxton wrote yesterday. “We recently secured a major victory against PornHub and other sites that sought to block this law from taking effect. In Texas, companies cannot get away with showing porn to children. If they don’t want to comply, good riddance.”

The 5th Circuit panel majority held that the Texas porn-site law should be reviewed on the “rational-basis” standard and not under strict scrutiny. In a dissent, Judge Patrick Higginbotham wrote that the law should face strict scrutiny because it “limits access to materials that may be denied to minors but remain constitutionally protected speech for adults.”

“[T]he Supreme Court has unswervingly applied strict scrutiny to content-based regulations that limit adults’ access to protected speech,” Higginbotham wrote.

Pornhub wants device-based age verification instead

Pornhub’s message to Texas users argued that “providing identification every time you want to visit an adult platform is not an effective solution for protecting users online, and in fact, will put minors and your privacy at risk.” Pornhub said that in other states with age-verification laws, “such bills have failed to protect minors, by driving users from those few websites which comply, to the thousands of websites, with far fewer safety measures in place, which do not comply.”

Pornhub’s message advocated for a device-based approach to age verification in which “personal information that is used to verify the user’s age is either shared in-person at an authorized retailer, inputted locally into the user’s device, or stored on a network controlled by the device manufacturer or the supplier of the device’s operating system.”

Pornhub says this could be used to prevent underage users from accessing age-restricted content without requiring websites to verify ages themselves. “To come to fruition, such an approach requires the cooperation of manufacturers and operating-system providers,” Pornhub wrote.

The age-verification question could eventually go to the Supreme Court. “This opinion will be appealed to the Supreme Court, alongside other cases over statutes imposing mandatory age authentication,” Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman wrote.

The 5th Circuit panel majority’s analysis relied on Ginsberg v. New York, a 1968 Supreme Court ruling about the sale of “girlie” magazines to a 16-year-old at a lunch counter. Goldman criticized the 5th Circuit for relying on Ginsburg “instead of the squarely on-point 1997 Reno v. ACLU and 2004 Ashcroft v. ACLU opinions, both of which dealt with the Internet.” Goldman argued that decisions upholding laws like the Texas one could open the door to “rampant government censorship.”

The Free Speech Coalition, an adult-industry lobby group that sued Texas over its law, said it “disagree[s] strenuously with the analysis of the Court majority. As the dissenting opinion by Judge Higginbotham makes clear, this ruling violates decades of precedent from the Supreme Court.” The group is considering its “next steps in regard to both this lawsuit and others.”

Pornhub blocks all of Texas to protest state law—Paxton says “good riddance” Read More »

deadly-morel-mushroom-outbreak-highlights-big-gaps-in-fungi-knowledge

Deadly morel mushroom outbreak highlights big gaps in fungi knowledge

CDC, fda, food poisoning, fungi, health, montana, morel mushrooms, outbreak, Science, sushi, toxin / /

This fungi’s not fun, guys —

Prized morels are unpredictably and puzzlingly deadly, outbreak report shows.

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Mature morel mushrooms in a greenhouse at an agriculture garden in Zhenbeibu Town of Xixia District of Yinchuan, northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region.

Enlarge / Mature morel mushrooms in a greenhouse at an agriculture garden in Zhenbeibu Town of Xixia District of Yinchuan, northwest China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region.

True morel mushrooms are widely considered a prized delicacy, often pricey and surely safe to eat. But these spongey, earthy forest gems have a mysterious dark side—one that, on occasion, can turn deadly, highlighting just how little we know about morels and fungi generally.

On Thursday, Montana health officials published an outbreak analysis of poisonings linked to the honeycombed fungi in March and April of last year. The outbreak sickened 51 people who ate at the same restaurant, sending four to the emergency department. Three were hospitalized and two died. Though the health officials didn’t name the restaurant in their report, state and local health departments at the time identified it as Dave’s Sushi in Bozeman. The report is published in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The outbreak coincided with the sushi restaurant introducing a new item: a “special sushi roll” that contained salmon and morel mushrooms. The morels were a new menu ingredient for Dave’s. They were served two ways: On April 8, the morels were served partially cooked, with a hot, boiled sauce poured over the raw mushrooms and left to marinate for 75 minutes; and on April 17, they were served uncooked and cold-marinated.

The mystery poison worked fast. Symptoms began, on average, about an hour after eating at the restaurant. And it was brutal. “Vomiting and diarrhea were reportedly profuse,” the health officials wrote, “and hospitalized patients had clinical evidence of dehydration. The two patients who died had chronic underlying medical conditions that might have affected their ability to tolerate massive fluid loss.”

Of the 51 sickened, 46 were restaurant patrons and five were employees. Among them, 45 (88 percent) recalled eating morels. While that’s a high percentage for such an outbreak investigation, certainly enough to make the morels the prime suspect, the health officials went further. With support from the CDC, they set up a matched case-control study, having people complete a detailed questionnaire with demographic information, food items they ate at the restaurant, and symptoms.

Mysterious poison

Forty-one of the poisoned people filled out the questionnaire, as did 22 control patrons who ate at the restaurant but did not report subsequent illness. The analysis indicated that the odds of recalling eating the special sushi roll were nearly 16 times higher among the poisoned patrons than among the controls. The odds of reporting any morel consumption were nearly 11 times higher than controls.

The detailed consumption data also allowed the health officials to model a dose response, which suggested that with each additional piece of the special roll a person recalled eating, their odds of sickness increased nearly threefold compared with people who reported eating none. Those who ate four or more pieces of the roll had odds nearly 22.5 times higher. A small analysis focusing on the five employees sickened, which was not included in the published study but was noted by the Food and Drug Administration, echoed the dose-response finding, indicating that sickness was linked with larger amounts of morel consumption.

When the officials broke down the analysis by people who ate at the restaurant on April 17, when the morels were served uncooked, and those who ate at the restaurant on April 8, when the mushrooms were slightly cooked, the cooking method seemed to matter. People who ate the uncooked rather than the slightly cooked mushrooms had much higher odds of sickness.

This all strongly points to the morels being responsible. At the time, the state and local health officials engaged the FDA, as well as the CDC, to help tackle the outbreak investigation. But the FDA reported that “samples of morel mushrooms collected from the restaurant were screened for pesticides, heavy metals, toxins, and pathogens. No significant findings were identified.” In addition, the state and local health officials noted that DNA sequencing identified the morels used by the restaurant as Morchella sextelata, a species of true morel. This rules out the possibility that the mushrooms were look-alike morels, called “false morels,” which are known to contain a toxin called gyromitrin.

The health officials and the FDA tracked down the distributor of the mushrooms, finding they were cultivated and imported fresh from China. Records indicated that 12 other locations in California also received batches of the mushrooms. Six of those facilities responded to inquiries from the California health department and the FDA, and all six reported no illnesses. They also all reported cooking the morels or at least thoroughly heating them.

Deadly morel mushroom outbreak highlights big gaps in fungi knowledge Read More »