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Yahoo investors are saying they're fed up with corporate vacillation and excessive spending. (credit: Photograph by Randy Stewart)

In recent days, Yahoo investors have been calling for a new plan and new leadership to restore the value of the company. Some argue for Yahoo to sell its core businesses as quickly as possible. Others are trying to build support to oust CEO Marissa Mayer and trim the company’s costs to absolute bare bones. All the while, Yahoo seemed ready to spin off the company's Alibaba holdings into a separate company.

But last week, Yahoo announced that it would reverse course. Instead of spinning off Alibaba, the board of directors said Yahoo would now work to spin off Yahoo’s core businesses, keeping the original company as a holding entity for the Alibaba shares. The company explained the tax climate for spinning off Alibaba holdings was simply unfavorable for investors. Mayer also noted the move would give more “transparency” to the operations of Yahoo’s core businesses, and analysts believed that implied Yahoo would be selling itself off bit by bit.

All this, however, has failed to make investors happy. The Wall Street Journal reported this weekend that Canyon Capital Advisors, an investment firm which owns 10 million shares (about 1.1 percent of Yahoo), is calling for Yahoo to begin selling all or parts of its core businesses immediately. Canyon Capital's strongly worded letter to fellow investors proclaimed that waiting another year to break Yahoo up from its Alibaba holdings is unacceptable. The investor wrote that Yahoo needs to start selling parts of its business off now or risk a further decline in the worth of the company.

(credit: Microdrones Gmbh)

The US Department of Transportation has launched a "streamlined and user-friendly" online registration process for aerial drones, starting today. New regulations announced in October require all drone owners to register.

In the view of the Federal Aviation Administration, drones or "unmanned aircraft systems" (UAS) qualify as aircraft, even if operated by hobbyists, and will be regulated as such. The registration website has been launched and includes frequently asked questions about the process. Actual online registrations won't begin until next Monday, December 21. For anyone registering in the first month, the $5 aircraft registration fee will be refunded.

Registration is legally required by February 19, 2016. The rule applies retroactively, so even someone who operated an unmanned aircraft prior to December 21 must register by the deadline. Anyone purchasing a drone after December 21 must register before the first outdoor flight.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have a number of exciting Green Monday deals for you! The featured deal today will save you lots of money on a curved Dell monitor: you can get a Dell UltraSharp 34-inch 3440×1440 curved IPS monitor plus a $250 Dell gift card for just $799. The list price of the monitor is $999, so with the gift card included, it's an especially great deal. Don't forget to check out Amazon as well, as it continues to price-match many popular items.

Check out the rest of the laptop, desktop, gaming, and accessory deals we have listed below.

Featured deals

(credit: SHANLISS_SNAPPER)

Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) gives pigs a fever and cough, but it costs American swine farmers over $600 million a year. Vaccines have been ineffective at fighting it, as has breeding pigs to be resistant. Last year, researchers in the Midwest used CRISPR-Cas9-based gene engineering to generate pigs that lack CD163, the protein that PRRS uses to infect its target cells in pigs. Now, the same team just demonstrated that the pigs lacking the receptor don't get sick when exposed to PRRS.

The three resistant pigs had deletions in both copies of their CD163 genes and thus made no CD163 protein. This lack did not seem to affect them in any adverse way. After weaning, these three and eight wild-type piglets were exposed to the strain of PRRS virus usually used in experimental infections, which happens to be a pretty virulent one.

The pigs were generated at the University of Missouri but infected at Kansas State University—the Kansans who did the infecting didn't know which pigs were which, making this what's called a blinded experiment. All of the pigs were kept in the same pens, so even if the initial infection didn't take, the pigs had plenty of opportunities to get sick from each other.

(credit: Marjan Lazarevski)

None of us can avoid the effects of aging, though many of us try in various ways, through cosmetics or nutrition and wellness products. Though these things may slow or disguise the progression of age-related effects, the health-related issues of aging remain. For the most part, researchers have had little luck developing treatments to postpone, ameliorate, or prevent the accumulation of diseases throughout one’s life. People may be living longer, but it's often with a reduced quality of life due to age-related diseases.

Recently, researchers have begun to explore the basic mechanisms of aging from the cellular level to the systemic level in order to develop new strategies to prevent age-related issues and better understand them. Last week's edition of Science took a look at some of the results.

At the cellular level

Aging represents the failure to balance genetic programs for survival and reproduction once an individual has survived beyond the age of peak reproductive fitness. Though all of our cells are important, some cells are more important than others. In particular, scientists have focused their attention on understanding how aging affects a specific, critical population of our cells—stem cells. Stem cells are only a small portion of our cells, but they are able to replicate themselves indefinitely and are able to transform into specific cell types (such as a bone cell or heart cell) based on external cues.

Enlarge / An payload that's been modified so it can't be misused. Malicious hackers are using it to perform an object injection attack that leads to a full remote command execution. (credit: Sucuri)

Attackers are actively exploiting a critical remote command-execution vulnerability that has plagued the Joomla content management system for almost eight years, security researchers said.

A patch for the vulnerability, which affects versions 1.5 through 3.4.5, was released Monday morning. It was too late: the bug was already being exploited in the wild, researchers from security firm Sucuri warned in a blog post. The attacks started on Saturday from a handful of IP addresses and by Sunday included hundreds of exploit attempts to sites monitored by Sucuri.

"Today (Dec 14th), the wave of attacks is even bigger, with basically every site and honeypot we have being attacked," the blog post reported. "That means that probably every other Joomla site out there is being targeted as well."

Onward... to a largely ignored launch!

Nintendo doesn't publish all that many Wii U games these days, but you can usually expect to hear a lot about the few games it does release; you may have seen the marketing blitzes for titles like Super Mario Maker or Xenoblade Chronicles X this holiday season. But last Friday's release of Devil's Third in North America was so quiet that probably only the most obsessive of Nintendo fans even realized the game exists.

Devil's Third has a storied and tumultuous development history. The game is the brainchild of Tomonobu Itagaki, the famed Tecmo developer known for series such as Dead or Alive and the 3D revival of the Ninja Gaiden series. After leaving Tecmo in 2008, Itagaki formed the independent Valhalla Game Studios with some other departing members of his Team Ninja development studio. Devil's Third was Valhalla's first announced game, revealed way back in 2010 as an Xbox 360, PS3, and Windows PC title. The game represented a departure from Itagaki's usual style, focusing on third-person shooting and online play rather than local brawling.

The game went through a number of changes in gameplay style and underlying technology over the years, according to reports at the time. But development dragged on for so long that its original publisher, THQ, actually went out of business in 2013 before releasing the unfinished game. Nintendo—perhaps seeing an opportunity to pick up an M-rated exclusive with a big name behind it—obtained the publishing rights and announced the game as a Wii U exclusive in a June 2014 "Digital Event."