Author: Megan Geuss

(credit: CBS)

On this, the 50^th anniversary of Ars' favorite (well, ) TV show, we've decided to resurface this old Star Trek retrospective from a writer who only ever watched the show as an adult. Whether you're a die-hard junkie or merely watched the Tribbles episode once on late-night reruns, we hope you'll find something interesting about the franchise in these year-old words.

Here at Ars Technica, we have Star Trek on the brain. A lot. It's a thing most of us have strong opinions about, and without a physical office, sometimes the IRC watercooler chat devolves into half-hour-long discussions about the relative merits of such and such a character. That is, until a senior editor implores us to write up our thoughts instead of wasting time arguing idly over chat; we are writers, after all, and writing is what we ought to be doing during the work day.

I, too, have strong opinions about characters in Star Trek, but I came at the show from a much different perspective than most of my peers. My colleagues were astounded when I told them that I'd only seen one episode of Star Trek as a child (I don't even remember the plot) and my first real exposure had been as an adult, when I watched the entirety of The Original Series and The Next Generation in order, over the course of three years or so.

The carbon fiber-reinforced plastic gets built up. (credit: Local Motors)

On Tuesday, General Electric announced that it would spend $1.4 billion (~£1 billion) to acquire two European 3D printing companies—Arcam AB from Sweden and SLM Solutions Group from Germany. According to the Associated Press, GE spent $1.5 billion (~£1.1 billion) on 3D printing investments since 2010, meaning the acquisitions will double what the company has invested in the last five years.

In a press release, GE noted that Arcam “invented the electron beam melting machine for metal-based additive manufacturing and also produces advanced metal powders.” SLM Solutions, on the other hand, “produces laser machines for metal-based additive manufacturing.” Both companies have histories of doing business in the aerospace and healthcare industries, and SLM Solutions also has customers in the energy and automotive industries.

Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, GE’s CEO of Aviation David Joyce said that GE’s jet engine business has been the primary outlet for so-called additive manufacturing at the company, but it plans to use 3D printing more frequently in its power turbine and medical equipment businesses.

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com—and let us know what you think.

Everyone of a certain age has their own experience playing The Oregon Trail on a computer as a kid.

Some of us started with the Apple II Oregon Trail, while some of us played later Oregon Trail versions. But we all learned what it meant to “ford a river” and “caulk a wagon.” Some of us played the Oregon Trail Deluxe version on Windows and acted out the scenes of our wagon train passing through what is now Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, and, if you were lucky, more western states. Some of us started as bankers and went crazy buying laudanum in the General Store. Some wanted the challenge and started as teachers. Some of us eschewed gameplay when things got dire and spent our time throwing out supplies to make room for everything we brought back from hunting.

“After the show was cancelled, most props were thrown in the dumpster,” Brooks Peck, curator at the EMP museum in Seattle, says of the set of Star Trek: The Original Series.

Peck is just one of many curators, actors, screenwriters, and fans that we meet in the Smithsonian Channel’s two-hour Star Trek tribute, Building Star Trek. Peck’s quiet enthusiasm shines through the frenetically-structured special. Part-documentary and part-reality show, the special shows how the iconic props from The Original Series are being restored and how they’ve influenced contemporary science.

Cheap props, rich imagination

As a fan, seeing the old Star Trek props is often as interesting as seeing the contemporary science that the props inspired. Building Star Trek opens with the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum bringing the original 11-foot model of the Starship Enterprise to expert restorers. The museum hopes to display the model in the Boeing “Icons of Flight” entry hall. Despite how precious some might consider the original Enterprise, the documentary gives the impression that most of the props and sets that survived have not been well cared for. On the model Enterprise, the Air and Space Museum’s chief conservator Malcolm Collum points out chipping paint and 50-year-old glue coming apart at the seams. The wiring within the ship that was used to light up its windows also needs restoring so the model won’t catch fire.

A Google self-driving car. (credit: Google)

A Michigan senator has introduced a bill that would make it legal for driverless autonomous vehicles to roam the streets of his state. Tomorrow, a committee on economic development will hold a hearing to discuss the bill, which has support from both Democrats and Republicans in Michigan’s senate.

The bill would keep a lot of the autonomous research and development that’s going on in Michigan in the state, and it could bring in other companies seeking to test out their driverless cars without human operators at the steering wheel.

"I want to make sure we plant the flag here and we maintain the lead in terms of automotive research and development,” Mike Kowall, the Republican state senator who introduced the measure, told CNN Money.

Enlarge

On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal said a “person familiar with the matter” confirmed that Google would be moving into the ride-sharing market currently dominated by Uber and, to a lesser extent, Lyft. The source said that since May, Google has been testing a feature that lets Google employees and employees of other nearby firms in the Bay Area organize carpools through Waze, a mapping and traffic app purchased by Google in 2013.

The report noted that this new service would be different from Uber and Lyft in that it would only try to connect people who are already going in the same direction, offering rates low enough to discourage drivers from operating like taxis. The service will only be available in San Francisco at the beginning.

According to the WSJ, Waze’s drivers in the closed pilot test only make 54 cents a mile, although Google doesn’t take a cut as Uber and Lyft do.

(credit: Wikipedia)

On Thursday, a federal jury in Seattle found Roman Seleznev guilty of stealing millions of credit card numbers and selling them online to other fraudsters. Seleznev, 32, is the son of Russian Parliament member Valery Seleznev.

Seleznev, who occasionally went by the moniker “Track2” online (a reference to one of the information strips on the back of a magnetic stripe card"), had been hacking into restaurant and retail Point of Sale (PoS) systems since at least October 2009 and continued until October 2013.

According to a 2014 indictment (PDF) from the Department of Justice, Seleznev and potentially others who are unknown to the investigators “developed and used automated techniques, such as port scanning, to identify computers and computer systems that were connected to the Internet [and] were dedicated to or involved with credit processing by retail businesses.”

(credit: Kevin Krejci)

On Thursday, federal antitrust regulators from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) approved electric vehicle maker Tesla’s bid to buy solar panel company SolarCity for $2.6 billion in an all-stock deal. The deal was expected to be approved, and Reuters reported that regulators fast-tracked the merger, along with a number of other, lower-profile mergers in which the two companies seeking to merge did little overlapping business.

Tesla announced the merger in June, and on August 1 it proposed terms for the takeover of the solar panel company—owners of SolarCity shares will get 0.11 shares of Tesla stock for every share of SolarCity stock they own. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who also serves on the SolarCity board, said he wanted to purchase the solar panel company to create an integrated solar platform in which houses could generate their own electricity (perhaps even with an entire Tesla-branded solar roof), store that energy in a Tesla Powerwall, and charge their electric vehicle. Servicing and installation would ideally become more consumer-friendly as well, as it would all come from the same company.

Tesla has also said that its growing experience in manufacturing at its Fremont, California, and Sparks, Nevada, locations could help SolarCity more effectively realize its own massive solar panel manufacturing project in Buffalo, New York.

According to the Department of Energy, this is an exploded waste drum in the dump. "Damage can be seen to the slip sheet on top of the waste container and there are remnants of a magnesium oxide bag also visible." (credit: Department of Energy )

The Los Angeles Times is estimating that an explosion that occurred at a New Mexico nuclear waste dumping facility in 2014 could cost upwards of $2 billion to clean up.

Construction began on the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico's Carlsbad desert in the 1980s (PDF). The site was built to handle transuranic waste from the US' nuclear weapons program. The WIPP had been eyed to receive nuclear waste from commercial, power-generating plants as well.

According to the LA Times, the 2014 explosion at the WIPP was downplayed by the federal government, with the Department of Energy (DoE) putting out statements indicating that cleanup was progressing quickly. Indeed, a 2015 Recovery Plan insisted that "limited waste disposal operations" would resume in the first quarter of 2016. Instead, two years have passed since the incident without any indication that smaller nuclear waste cleanup programs around the US will be able to deliver their waste to the New Mexico facility any time soon.

Enlarge (credit: Tesla)

On Tuesday, Tesla announced its new P100D version of the Model S and Model X. The cars are fast and have huge batteries—and of course, they’re very, very pricey.

The electric vehicle company headed by CEO Elon Musk called the Model S P100D the “quickest production car in the world,” noting that only two cars are faster—the LaFerrari and the Porsche 918 Spyder, both cars that were limited-run two-seaters. With the “Ludicrous Mode” option (which customers must pay extra for), the Model S P100D will go 0 to 60 miles per hour in 2.5 seconds. (That’s 0 to 100km/h in 2.7 seconds.)

When Ludicrous Mode was announced last summer, it only took a Model S P85D from 0 to 60 mph in a lackadaisical 2.8 seconds.