Jon Edwards often manages what appears impossible. He has recovered precious data from computers wrecked in floods and fires and dumped in lakes. Now Edwards may have set a new standard: He found information on a melted disk drive that fell from the sky when space shuttle Columbia disintegrated in 2003.

“When we got it, it was two hunks of metal stuck together. We couldn’t even tell it was a hard drive. It was burned and the edges were melted,” said Edwards, an engineer at Kroll Ontrack Inc., outside Minneapolis. “It looked pretty bad at first glance, but we always give it a shot.”

During Columbia’s fateful mission, the drive had been used to store data from a scientific experiment on the properties of liquid xenon.

Most of the information was radioed to Earth during Columbia’s voyage. Edwards was able to recover the remainder, allowing researchers to publish the experiment in the April issue of a science journal, Physical Review E.

That led Kroll Ontrack to share details of its salvage effort.

TorrentSpy bit the dust only weeks ago, shuttering its peer-to-peer file-sharing site. Now a federal judge has ordered the company to pay the Motion Picture Association of America $110 million for infringement of thousands of copyrighted film and TV shows.

In a four-page final ruling issued Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Florence-Marie Cooper entered the multimillion-dollar judgment against TorrentSpy parent company Valence Media for willfully inducing, contributing and vicariously allowing copyright infringement on its Web site.

Cooper also issued a permanent injunction against the Web site, which shut down March 24.

The MPAA, which represents the Hollywood studios, filed suit against TorrentSpy in February 2006, claiming that the site’s torrent files were illegally uploaded.

Whether the MPAA will collect the $110 million from TorrentSpy remains to be seen. Court records show that Valence and TorrentSpy principles Justin Bunnell and Wes Parker have filed for bankruptcy.

Facebook Inc. is loosening its grip on millions of personal profiles to allow inhabitants of its popular Internet hangout to transplant the information and applications to other Web sites.

With the changes announced Friday, Facebook joins a growing movement to make it easier for people to share their favorite pictures, information and applications with family and friends anywhere on the Internet.

Facebook, which has about 70 million users worldwide, unveiled its plans the day after its bigger rival, News Corp.’s MySpace, made a similar commitment.

Unlike MySpace, which has about 200 million users worldwide, Palo Alto-based Facebook plans to allow users to take their personal profiles to any Web site that wants to host them. For starters, MySpace is opening user profiles only to a select group of sites, including leading destinations owned by Yahoo Inc. and eBay Inc.

Both Facebook and MySpace say several weeks remain before their users’ data becomes portable.