Special Section: Energy

Boeing officials explained their plan to improve manufacturing quality and safety during a three-hour meeting Thursday with federal officials, who will continue restrictions they placed on the company after one of its jetliners suffered a blowout of a fuselage panel in January. Federal Aviation Administration chief Mike Whitaker said the plan is comprehensive and includes encouraging Boeing employees to speak up about safety concerns. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] “This is a guide for a new way for Boeing to do business.” Whitaker told reporters after the meeting.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) On Thursday, several major tech companies, including Google, Intel, Microsoft, Meta, AMD, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco, and Broadcom, announced the formation of the Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) Promoter Group to develop a new interconnect standard for AI accelerator chips in data centers. The group aims to create an alternative to Nvidia's proprietary NVLink interconnect technology, which links together multiple servers that power today's AI applications like ChatGPT. The beating heart of AI these days lies in GPUs, which can perform massive numbers of matrix multiplications—necessary for running neural network architecture—in parallel.

Enlarge (credit: Alistair Berg) Misinformation is not a new problem, but there are plenty of indications that the advent of social media has made things worse. Academic researchers have responded by trying to understand the scope of the problem, identifying the most misinformation-filled social media networks, organized government efforts to spread false information, and even prominent individuals who are the sources of misinformation. All of that's potentially valuable data.

Enlarge / Holstein cows at a dairy farm. (credit: Getty | John Carl D'Annibale) Another dairy farm worker in Michigan has been infected with avian influenza virus, state and federal health officials reported Thursday. The case marks the third time the outbreak of bird flu in milking cows is known to have spilled over to a human.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) An international cast of law enforcement agencies has struck a blow at a cybercrime linchpin that’s as obscure as it is instrumental in the mass-infection of devices: so-called droppers, the sneaky software that’s used to install ransomware, spyware, and all manner of other malware. Europol said Wednesday it made four arrests, took down 100 servers, and seized 2,000 domain names that were facilitating six of the best-known droppers.

Enlarge / For a while the Lyriq was a rare sight on the road, but now that production has picked up, we decided it was time to get a second impression. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin) We first drove the Cadillac Lyriq a couple of years ago. It was the first of a whole range of new electric vehicles from General Motors built on shared electric powertrain components.