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Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos CEO and the world's youngest self-made female billionaire, in an interview on September 29, 2015. (Photo by David Orrell/CNBC/NBCU, Photo Bank via Getty Images.) (credit: Getty Images | CNBC)

Amid intense scrutiny, lawsuits, harsh federal sanctions, and criminal probes, Theranos CEO and founder Elizabeth Holmes will finally present data on her struggling company’s blood testing technology.

She will present today at 4:30pm in a special session of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry’s annual conference, being held this year in Philadelphia.

The presentation couldn’t come at a more dire time for the company, which has seen a staggering number of setbacks in recent months. The most prominent of those include federal regulators banning Holmes from the clinical blood testing business for at least two years and shuttering one of the company’s labs. Theranos has seen its valuation drop from $9 billion to around $800 million. Its commercial partner, Walgreens, also backed out of its contract and shut down 40 of the companies' joint “wellness centers.”

(credit: Getty Images | aledettaale)

Google Fiber started examining Nashville, Tennessee, for a possible deployment more than two and a half years ago, it confirmed plans to build in January 2015, and it started serving a few apartment and condominium buildings in the city in April of this year. But further progress is being slowed in part by difficulties obtaining access to utility poles, and legislation designed to solve the problem is being resisted by incumbents AT&T and Comcast.

Nashville Scene has a thorough article on the controversy, with quotes from the major players. Google Fiber needs access to thousands of telephone poles and must cooperate with the area's other Internet providers to install their wires. Most of the poles are owned by Nashville Electric Service, the local utility, while AT&T is the second biggest owner of utility poles in the city.

When Google notifies the owner that it needs access to a pole, the owner "will then notify each telecom company that it needs to send a crew to the pole—one after another—to move their equipment and accommodate the new party," Nashville Scene wrote. "The process can take months, even if contractually mandated time frames are followed. Google Fiber officials and operatives working on their behalf suggest that’s not always the case."

For most of the last five years, NASA’s space launch system has been largely a PowerPoint rocket, consisting of designs on computers and disparate hardware in various stages of development across the United States. But now the massive SLS rocket is starting to come together, and senior NASA managers are optimistic about its future.

“This is an amazing period of time in US spaceflight,” Bill Gerstenmaier, chief of human spaceflight for NASA, said last week during a meeting of the agency’s advisory council. “I’m starting to see a real shift from just kind of hardware development to almost a flight cadence. The volume of work is just amazing.” He added that with “roughly” two years to go before the first launch of SLS and the Orion spacecraft, the agency is beginning to test flight hardware.

Barring further delays, the maiden launch of SLS will occur between September and November 2018. Until now NASA has been mostly designing and building individual components of the massive rocket, which will have an initial capability to heft 70 metric tons to low-Earth orbit but may eventually grow into a 130-ton rocket. However, now the focus is turning toward testing that hardware and, later next year and in 2018, beginning to integrate it for launch.

Spread it with fire (credit: USDA)

Tuberculosis (TB), a bacterial infection, is currently the most deadly single pathogen in the world. How did this bacterium become a global scourge? A recent paper published in PNAS posits that when early humans began to utilize fires, they generated conditions ideal for the emergence of TB. If this hypothesis is correct, it could have serious implications for the study of emergent infectious diseases and how they interact with cultural and technological advances.

Evolutionary data, including whole genome sequencing, suggests that TB first became a human pathogen tens of thousands of years ago during the Neolithic period on the continent of Africa. It’s thought to have come from land mammals (especially bovines). There is also data suggesting that, in the Americas, TB hopped into infected humans from sea mammals. For the purposes of this paper, however, the authors chose to focus on the Africa-based ancestors of modern TB.

For an environmental pathogen to become an endemic human disease, it must first undergo a series of profound evolutionary transformations. The pathogen must adapt to the biological environment of their human hosts and must be able to readily move among them. The authors of the new paper discuss ways in which fire may have promoted these necessary transformations.

Last year's Windows 10 release was unlike any Windows release I've ever used before, and I've used most of them.

Almost every Windows release to-date had a sort of unfinished vibe that reflects the product's history. Parts of the operating system developed long ago have almost fossilized, being preserved verbatim in each subsequent release. It gives the entire operating system an overall incomplete feel.

Take Control Panel as an example. The oldest parts of Control Panel use dialogs for each group of settings, as this mouse window exemplifies. Those tabs are extensible by third parties. That SetPoint Settings tab, for example, launches Logitech's mouse app for configuring the various buttons on my Performance MX mouse. New systems to this very day continue to use this extensibility; most Windows laptops will have a tab to configure their touchpad.