Tech Scrape

A solar-driven process could yield far more fuel than conventional biomass production. Sundrop Fuels , a startup based in Louisville, CO, says it has developed a cleaner and more efficient way to turn biomass into synthetic fuels by harnessing the intense heat of the sun to vaporize wood and crop waste. Its process can produce twice the amount of gasoline or diesel per ton of biomass compared to conventional biomass gasification systems, the company claims.

Security firm aims to make installing updates as painless and invisible as possible. Recent research shows that the typical PC user needs to install a security update roughly every five days in order to safely use Microsoft Windows and all of the third-party programs that typically run on top of it. In response, a Danish computer security firm says it will soon debut a free new service that silently automates the installation of security updates for dozens of the most commonly used software products.

Analyzing the connections between sites could help spot Web attacks. Over the past couple of years, cybercriminals have increasingly focused on finding ways to inject malicious code into legitimate websites. Typically they’ve done this by embedding code in an editable part of a page and using this code to serve up harmful content from another part of the Web. But this activity can be difficult to spot because websites also increasingly pull in legitimate content, such as ads, videos, or snippets of code, from outside sites.

A novel fuel-injection system achieves 64 miles per gallon. Transonic Combustion , a startup based in Camarillo, TX, has developed a fuel-injection system it says can improve the efficiency of gasoline engines by more than 50 percent. A test vehicle equipped with the technology gets 64 miles per gallon in highway driving, which is far better than more costly gas-electric hybrids , such as the Prius, which gets 48 miles per gallon on the highway.

Companies are working to add value to geospatial information. Thanks to smart phones and other mobile devices, the number of applications that make use of geolocation data is exploding. But developers and device makers face new challenges that include determining physical location accurately, turning coordinates into meaningful information, and protecting users’ privacy.

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

The lead-free material may make it easier and cheaper to make “stacked” chips with more computing power. A new type of solder can be melted and shaped in three dimensions under the force of a weak magnetic field. Using a magnet to pull the solder up through narrow holes makes it possible to create electrical connections between stacked silicon chips, for example. These three-dimensional chips pack more computing power in a given area, but making connections between them is expensive, a problem that the new solder might address. The solder also contains no lead, and it is stronger than other lead-free solders.

New software aims to expose mobile malware by monitoring a device’s memory usage. Yesterday at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, a researcher presented a new way to detect malware on mobile devices. He says it can catch even unknown pests and can protect a device without draining its battery or taking up too much processing power.

1366 Technologies hopes to cut the cost of solar with cheaper manufacturing. A new manufacturing process could cut the cost of making crystalline silicon wafers for solar cells by 80 percent. The process is being developed by Lexington, MA-based 1366 Technologies , which this week showed off the first solar cells made this way. The technology is key to the company’s plan to make solar power cheaper than the electricity generated from coal within 10 years.

Specially designed molecules could lead to all-optical data switches that could make the Internet far faster. New molecules produced at Georgia Tech could enable engineers to build all-optical data routers, ultimately leading to transmission speeds as high as two terabits–or 2,000 gigabits–per second. Today’s fastest commercial routers switch data at 40 gigabits per second.