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Theranos CEO and founder Elizabeth Holmes. (credit: Max Morse for TechCrunch)

With bunk blood tests and medical equipment, possible federal sanctions, a criminal probe, voided patient reports, and possible class action lawsuits, Theranos has taken quite the hit.

On Wednesday, Forbes put dollar values to that hit. The business magazine reported that the company’s valuation—based on “a dozen venture capitalists, analysts and industry experts”—has been downgraded from its $9 billion estimate 2014 to just $800 million now. And because Forbes’ valuation of Theranos CEO and founder, Elizabeth Holmes, was based solely on her 50 percent stake in the company, their estimate of her net worth dropped from $4.5 billion to “nothing.”

In 2015, Forbes ranked Holmes the number one self-made women in America.

An artist's rendering of a brain tumor that can be killed off with the help of a virus. (credit: C. Bickel / Science Translational Medicine (2016))

To defeat the deadliest of cancers, it's time to unleash the viruses.

In a small clinical trial with brain cancer patients, a tumor-seeking virus successfully invaded cancer cells and smuggled in molecular detonators, allowing doctors to selectively blast the deadly growths with a toxic drug. In the trial’s 45 participants, who were fighting the most aggressive forms of brain cancer known, the virus-drug combo nearly doubled their average survival time while showing no dangerous side effects. The finding, published Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine, demonstrates the utility of such viruses and also provides a green light for the treatment strategy to move on to more trials.

These brain cancers usually have few treatment options and lead to “dismal clinical outcomes,” the authors wrote. However, this new viral therapy has “the potential to fill this medical need,” they concluded.

Don't expect to see cars like this on Parisian streets after this summer (unless it's a weekend). (credit: Don O'Brien @ Flickr)

Parisians with cars built before 1997 are going to need to head to the nearest car dealership if they want to keep driving in the city after July 1.

The French capital has experienced quite horrific air pollution in the last few years, and there was a massive spike in March 2015 that saw the city's air quality drop lower than that of Beijing, China. After trying out temporary restrictions to vehicle traffic, Les Echos reports that the city has decided to implement new rules that will ban older and more polluting vehicles from its streets on weekdays. Those restrictions will also tighten over time; in 2020, only cars built since 2011 will be allowed.

The vehicle classification scheme means you get one of these window stickers based on which Euro emissions standard your vehicle complies with.

This announcement follows a decision by the French government to finalize a nation-wide scheme of ranking vehicle emissions (the system is based on the European emissions standards). Any vehicle made on or before December 31, 1996 was built to conform with Euro 1, the weakest of these standards, and it's these cars that are no longer allowed in the capital. Pre-2000 motorbikes and other two-wheeled vehicles are also on the hit list.

(credit: Lee Hutchinson)

When it comes to succeeding in the marketplace with an alternative energy vehicle, building a good car is only one part of the equation. If you want lots of people to adopt the new technology, they have to be able to recharge it regularly and with ease. It's arguably a reason that Tesla's cars have been such a hit. Fifteen minutes on a supercharger will give an empty Model S or Model X a range of more than 100 miles, enough to reach the next supercharger (lather, rinse, repeat).

Even more appealing is the fact that those Model S and Model X drivers don't have to pay anything for the privilege; access to the company's supercharger network is factored into the purchase price (although it was a $2,500 option for the less-powerful Model S at one point). Unfortunately for the more than 400,000 people who've ordered a Model 3, this won't be the case. During a shareholder call on Tuesday, Elon Musk explained that economics mean that Tesla is not going to offer that same deal to customers of the $40,000 electric vehicle.

The cheapest Model S costs $71,500 before any tax incentives or rebates, and most customers spend a lot more than that to buy the more powerful 90kWh version. By contrast, the Model 3 will almost cost half that amount, produced in much larger volume. It is likely that Tesla will offer Model 3 customers a cost option for lifetime access to the network, but Musk told shareholders that the company will have to charge Model 3 owners something, because it hasn't worked out how to do it for free.

Enlarge / Guys, I need you to squeeze closer together if we're going to get all of you in one photo!

Since Overwatch's launch last week, there has been a proliferation of online lists ranking the game's 21 characters on their raw power, or their effectiveness in certain modes, or their ability to counter certain other characters, or whatever metric you'd like.

Those lists are useful and fine for what they are. But after playing the game extensively for the last week or so (and seeing our beta impressions validated in a post-launch environment), we thought it would be more useful to rank the characters by how much fun we've had playing as each of them.

Below, Ars gaming contributor Steven Strom and I place every single Overwatch character into one of three self-explanatory tiers: "Fun," "Meh," and "Not Fun." These rankings are based partly on how useful the characters are to helping the team (because winning is fun), but they're more focused on how interesting and versatile they are for inventive and satisfying play. The rankings all assume the character is filling a needed hole in the team, too. A team of six Tracers is a lot less fun than a team where other characters can help protect her, for example.

Mare Island in Vallejo, CA has been an abandoned naval shipyard for years. (credit: Thomas Hawk)

Electric vehicle startup Faraday Future doesn’t have a production-ready car yet, but it has said it wants to get to that milestone within two years. The company just broke ground on a $1 billion (£0.7 billion), 3 million-square-foot factory in North Las Vegas in April, and now it wants another factory on Mare Island, a former naval shipyard located in Vallejo, a city north of San Francisco.

On Tuesday evening, the Vallejo City Council unanimously approved a six-month exclusive negotiating contract with FF LLC, a special-purpose subsidiary of Faraday Future, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Over the next six months, the company will solidify its proposal for the 157-acre site and present it to third-party lawyers and consultants representing the city. Faraday Future has agreed that it will pay the city’s legal and consulting fees as well as a $200,000 non-refundable negotiation fee, the Times says.

(credit: Dennis Skley)

A federal appeals court is reviving a lawsuit targeting a website for models because the site did not warn users that there were rapists reading the site in search of their next victim. The Communications Decency Act (CDA), the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday, did not immunize the website Modelmayhem.com from a suit brought by an aspiring model who said she was drugged, raped, and filmed by two men during a phony 2011 audition.

Craigslist, eBay, Facebook, and other online companies had told the court (PDF) that such a ruling would have a chilling effect on the Web. In a court filing, they said that the CDA shields website operators "from the risks, burdens, and uncertainty of lawsuits that would hold them liable for hosting or facilitating online exchanges of third-party information that may result in harm."

But the federal appeals court, which issued a similar ruling in 2014 but set it aside to rehear the case again, wasn't buying the argument. The CDA, one of the foundational laws that has allowed the Internet to flourish, protects online outlets from legal liability for the content that third parties publish on it, the court noted. But here, the owner of the website, Internet Brands, had obtained knowledge that there were rapists who trolled the site for women, pretended they were agents, and raped and filmed the women who thought they were going for a job interview, the court ruled.