Tech Scrape

A startup makes a new entry in the race to build the virtual personal assistant. Smart phones promise a lot of computing power and connectivity: We can search the Web and communicate from anywhere. But it can be hard to make full use of all these capabilities on small screens with tiny buttons. Now comes a new wave of applications that combine speech recognition and artificial intelligence to help people carry out simple tasks on their mobile devices.

HP is developing new materials for brighter low-power displays. Electronic paper that reflects light, instead of filtering it from a backlight, as most conventional displays do, is easy on the eyes and saves on battery life. But this reliance on ambient light becomes a handicap when trying to make a bright, beautiful color display. Researchers at HP are addressing the problem by developing new materials that use ambient light to create a more vibrant color for video-capable, low-power screens.

A new test is transforming the way some doctors diagnose and treat their patients. As a genre, personalized medicine has yet to deliver many individualized treatments. But progress has been more tangible on the diagnostics side.

The financial crisis in Europe is unlikely to derail Brussels’ clean power vision. European renewable energy installations hit record levels last year and are likely to grow strongly over the next decade, despite European governments’ budget woes. That’s the view of a report released last week by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Brussels. The report suggests that the growth won’t be slowed by the German parliament’s approval on Friday of a reduction in price supports for solar power, or by a similar reduction in solar incentives by Spain last year.

The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv this week A Failure Of Serendipity: The Square Kilometre Array Will Struggle To Eavesdrop On Human-Like ETI

Approach could help software learn how to identify fake accounts with less honorable intentions. It’s not unusual to have user profiles on multiple social networks, or even separate accounts on sites like Twitter–one for work and one for play. But Kyumin Lee at Texas A&M University has 60 Twitter accounts, and not because he’s popular.

A real-time auction system will create even more targeted ads. The real dream of any advertiser is to grab the attention of the right person at the right time. A new approach to online advertising, known as real-time bidding, could help make that vision easier to achieve.

Nighttime flight is an important milestone–but solar power is unlikely to transform aviation. Swiss researchers yesterday marked a major milestone in the development of a solar-powered, single-pilot aircraft that they hope will eventually circumnavigate the globe. They kept their craft aloft through an entire night on stored solar energy.

RainDance Technologies says its method of amplifying DNA in drops of water will expand clinical genetic testing. As the cost of DNA sequencing continues to fall and scientists discover a growing number of genes linked to different diseases, the field of genetic diagnostics is preparing for a boom. Rather than the single-gene tests common today, clinical genetics laboratories are developing tests that simultaneously detect tens or even hundreds of genetic mutations linked to cancer and other diseases, as well as conditions such as mental retardation.

A soft, flexible fibre with a 1000 times more capacitance than a co-axial cable could lead to smarter textiles, say its inventors A long-standing dream of a certain cadre of computer specialists is to create smart textiles that can sense their environment, store, transmit and process information as well as harvest and store the energy necessary to do all this. A particular driver of this technology is the military which would very much like to remotely monitor the health and status of troops on the battlefield.