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(credit: churl)

According to a press release from DriveSavers data recovery, information on nearly 200 floppy disks that belonged to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry has been recovered.

The information on the disks belongs to Roddenberry’s estate and has not been disclosed to the general public. DriveSavers notes, however, that Roddenberry used the disks to store his work and "to capture story ideas, write scripts and [take] notes." VentureBeat reports that the disks, containing 160KB of data each, were likely used and written in the '80s.

The circumstances of the information recovery are particularly interesting, however. Several years after the death of Roddenberry, his estate found the 5.25-inch floppy disks. Although the Star Trek creator originally typed his scripts on typewriters, he later moved his writing to two custom-built computers with custom-made operating systems before purchasing more mainstream computers in advance of his death in 1991.

An illustration of what WFIRST will look like once launched. (credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center)

Thanks to an infusion of Congressional funding, NASA has accelerated development of a telescope that could answer some of the most fundamental questions about both the universe and nearby exoplanets. At the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Monday, NASA's Paul Hertz said the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) project will formally begin this year instead of 2017.

Hertz, who directs NASA's astrophysics division, made the announcement after Congress increased funding for the new flagship telescope project to $90 million for fiscal year 2016, far above the president's $16 million budget request. The telescope's 2.4-meter mirror is designed to measure light from nearly 400 million galaxies and 2,600 exoplanets during its primary, six-year mission.

The WFIRST project emerged as a top priority for NASA after astronomers, in their last decadal survey in 2010, said that such a mission would answer some of their most important questions. The project has evolved over time, but it is now being designed to take advantage of a spy satellite donated to NASA by the National Reconnaissance Observatory in 2012. The mission could launch within about a decade.

Don't expect to see such a splash screen on a TV series for a while—at least, certainly not through the Yahoo Screen portal, which has now been officially shuttered. (credit: Yahoo)

Yahoo's push to host exclusive TV and video content appears to have hit a major speed bump, as the company confirmed it had closed its dedicated Yahoo Screen hub site on Monday. Visitors to the Yahoo Screen site, which had hosted archival Saturday Night Live clips, a single NFL online broadcast, and the company's line of 2015 "original" series, are currently being bounced to the vanilla URL of http://yahoo.com.

iOS and Android app shoppers will no longer find the Yahoo Screen app as of today, as well, though Ars was still able to stream episodes of all three original Yahoo series—Community's sixth season and the pilot seasons of Sin City Saints and Other Space—on devices that already had the app installed. As of right now, those series are not promoted at any of Yahoo's major portals in an obvious way; we had to dig around before finding them buried in the Yahoo TV site at an inelegant "originals" URL.

The development follows Yahoo executives specifically citing the company's three TV series projects as money-losers to the tune of a $42 million write-down during a Q3 earnings call in October. At the time, Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman told investors that with "certain of our original video content, we couldn't see our way to make money over time." That call came before Yahoo had aired the NFL's first-ever, online-only regular season game, which drew an international audience of 15 million; the broadcast's rights cost Yahoo an additional $10 million.

(credit: Krzysztof Lasoń)

Highly destructive malware that infected at least three regional power authorities in Ukraine led to a power failure that left hundreds of thousands of homes without electricity last week, researchers said.

The outage left about half of the homes in the Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine without electricity, Ukrainian news service TSN reported in an article posted a day after the December 23 failure. The report went on to say that the outage was the result of malware that disconnected electrical substations. On Monday, researchers from security firm iSIGHT Partners said they had obtained samples of the malicious code that infected at least three regional operators. They said the malware led to "destructive events" that in turn caused the blackout. If confirmed it would be the first known instance of someone using malware to generate a power outage.

"It's a milestone because we've definitely seen targeted destructive events against energy before—oil firms, for instance—but never the event which causes the blackout," John Hultquist, head of iSIGHT's cyber espionage intelligence practice, told Ars. "It's the major scenario we've all been concerned about for so long."

(credit: Thomas Hawk)

The US Department of Justice has sued Volkswagen Group (PDF) in a Michigan District Court on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), alleging that the automaker installed illegal defeat devices on almost 600,000 diesel passenger vehicles.

The lawsuit is the latest chapter in the fallout since the EPA published a notice of violation in September accusing Volkswagen of installing software on many of its diesel vehicles that would stop the car’s emissions control system from working properly during normal driving, but engage the emissions control system while the car was being tested in a lab, effectively helping Volkswagen cheat air quality regulators in the US.

A press release from the EPA said that approximately 499,000 diesel cars with 2.0 liter engines were found to have defeat devices, and some 85,000 cars with 3.0 liter engines were similarly implicated. The complaint filed by the Department of Justice suggests that the software to defeat the emissions control system in 2.0 and 3.0 liter cars was slightly different, however.

T-Mobile USA CEO John Legere announces Binge On. (credit: T-Mobile USA)

T-Mobile USA's controversial "Binge On" program is throttling all HTML5 video streams and direct video downloads to about 1.5Mbps, according to tests run by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

Binge On, unveiled in November, is enabled by default for all T-Mobile customers and downgrades video resolution to 480p in order to reduce data usage. Companies that cooperate with T-Mobile can stream video without counting against customers' high-speed data limits. That means you can watch Netflix, HBO, Hulu, and about another 20 services without using up your data.

But all video is downgraded, regardless of whether it gets a data cap exemption, which has led to a rift between T-Mobile and Google's YouTube.

An Ascending Technologies Falcon 8 octocopter drone in flight, with Intel inside. (credit: Ascending Technologies)

In an effort to bolster its position in the growing "Internet of Things" market and the exploding unmanned air vehicle market, Intel is acquiring German drone company Ascending Technology. The purchase was announced today in a blog post by Josh Walden, Intel's senior vice president and general manager of the company's New Technology Group.

Ascending had previously partnered with Intel to use Intel's RealSense real-time depth sensing technology as part of its "sense and avoid" software, which helps drones detect objects and navigate around them safely. That software development is a key reason for the acquisition, Walden wrote. "With Ascending Technologies, Intel gains expertise and technology to accelerate the deployment of Intel RealSense technology into the fast growing drone market segment," he said. "We plan for the Ascending Technologies team to continue supporting their current customers while also collaborating with Intel’s Perceptual Computing team to develop UAV technology that can help drones fly with more awareness of their environments."

Ascending is focused on "professional" drones. The company sells unmanned systems packages based on its Falcon 8 drone for tasks like surveying, professional photography, and "precision agriculture" (using optical and infrared sensors to monitor crop growth, soil properties, and the need for application of fertilizer and pesticides). Ascending also offers a number of research-oriented drones for universities and robotics development laboratories, and the company's research drones are all based on Intel processors.