Tech Scrape

Networking sensors attached to taxis could ease the hunt for street parking. Anyone who’s driven in a crowded downtown knows that parking can mean almost endless circling in the hunt for a space close to your destination. Now engineers at Rutgers University in New Jersey have combined simple ultrasonic sensors, GPS receivers, and cellular data networks to create a low-cost, highly effective way to find the nearest available parking space.

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Finding a Parking Space Could Soon Get Easier

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Government incentives and lower solar prices are starting to pay off. In a few years, the United States is likely to be the world’s largest market for solar power, eclipsing Germany, which has taken the lead as a result of strong government incentives in spite of the relative paucity of sunlight in that country. A number of factors could make growth possible in the United States–especially changes in legislation that give utilities incentives to create large solar farms.

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U.S. Solar Market to Double in the Next Year

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The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv this week:

Excerpt from:
Blog – V ‘n’ III

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Francis Collins’s book offers optimism but no grand plan. In the final pages of his new book about personalized medicine, Francis Collins offers a compelling vision of the future via a fictional character named Hope, born on January 1, 2000. Collins describes a world where Hope and most other people have had the entirety of their DNA sequenced and integrated with predictive models that make suggestions about diet, lifestyle, and treatments to optimize their health. The result for Hope is a healthy and productive life beyond age 100.

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From Hope to Reality in Personalized Medicine

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IBM shows graphene transistors could one day outpace silicon. IBM has created graphene transistors that leave silicon ones in the dust. The prototype devices, made from atom-thick sheets of carbon, operate at 100 gigahertz–meaning they can switch on and off 100 billion times each second, about 10 times as fast as the speediest silicon transistors.

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Graphene Transistors that Work at Blistering Speeds

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Developers think these phase-change materials could reduce the need for air-conditioning. Building materials that absorb heat during the day and release it at night, eliminating the need for air-conditioning in some climates, will soon be on the market in the United States. The North Carolina company National Gypsum is testing drywall sheets–the plaster panels that make up the walls in most new buildings–containing capsules that absorb heat to passively cool a building. The capsules, made by global chemical giant BASF , can be incorporated into a range of construction materials and are already found in some products in Europe.

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"Melting" Drywall Keeps Rooms Cool

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Scheme gives law enforcement officials access, but flaws could make it useful for criminals as well. A scheme that gives U.S. law enforcement authorities with a warrant access to networking equipment could also be exploited by illegal snoopers.

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How Legal Wiretaps Could Let Hackers In

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Photoreceptors created from induced pluripotent stem cells. Think twice the next time you wipe a few flecks of dandruff from your shoulder. You might be shedding cells that may someday restore human vision.

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Crafting Light-Sensing Cells from Human Skin

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Loan guarantees in the 2011 federal budget could help revive the nuclear power industry. President Obama’s proposed 2011 budget could provide a significant boost to the U.S. nuclear power industry, which has been stalled for decades. If approved by Congress, the budget would provide $36 billion in loan guarantees for nuclear power plants , opening the way for around seven new nuclear power plants, depending on the final cost of each. The new guarantees are in addition to $18.5 billion in guarantees provided for in a 2005 energy bill.

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Obama Goes Nuclear

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Cost and power efficiency may have pushed Apple to create its own microchip. Despite widespread speculation, nothing beyond what Steve Jobs announced last week is known about the A4 chip at the heart of the Apple iPad.

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What’s Inside the iPad’s Chip?

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