Electric cars could benefit from a new manufacturing method. A new chemical trick for making nanostructured materials could help increase the range and reliability of electric cars and lead to better batteries that could help stabilize the power grid.

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A Boost for Battery Life and Capacity

Wireless chargers are more convenient, but less efficient. GM and Nissan will have to overcome many consumer concerns as they bring mass-market plug-in hybrid and electric cars to market this winter. One aspect that might make potential buyers hesitate is a fear that they’ll forget to plug in their cars when they get home, and thus won’t have a charged-up car in the morning.

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Can Electric Vehicles Lose the Plug?

Digital encoding could catch future informants. Attorney General Eric Holder’s new probe into Wikileaks’s posting of 91,000 war documents will likely find that tracing the path of the documents back through the Internet is next to impossible. But watermarks–if they were embedded in the files–could reveal the whistle-blower.

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The Hunt for the Wikileaks Whistle-blower

The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv this week: Cluster Reverberation: A Mechanism For Robust Short-Term Memory Without Synaptic Learning

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Blog – Facts ‘n’ Fixes

A federal investigation finds conflicting test results and false marketing claims.

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Video – Genetic Tests Get Bad Grades

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Proximity based social network

A malicious site can find out what social-networking groups you belong to–and then figure out your identity. People often get categorized by social group–jock, geek, soccer mom. The same is true for our online identities: If you have an account on Facebook or LinkedIn, you might also belong to several groups on each site.

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Your Groups Tell Hackers Who You Are

A simple method applies nanoscale texturing over large areas. Nanoscale wires, pores, bumps, and other textures can dramatically improve the performance of solar cells, displays, and even self-cleaning coatings. Now researchers at Stanford University have developed a simpler, cheaper way to add these features to large surfaces.

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Bumpy Coatings for Better Solar Cells

Using the contents of images or videos to target Web ads could improve click-through. Web ads help subsidize free content and services, and have made Google into the behemoth it is today. But the software used to tailor them to a user’s interests can only do this by analyzing the words on a webpage.

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Ads that Match a Web Page’s Images

Drug companies are harnessing new knowledge of cancer genetics. The plummeting cost of DNA sequencing has enabled scientists to explore the genetic complexities of cancer with an ever-finer comb , uncovering a growing number of genetic mutations that drive cancer. Now this genetic knowledge is being used to direct drug development by testing specific compounds on 1,000 cancer cell lines that incorporate many of these mutations. The findings will help pharmaceutical companies design clinical trials so that they include only those patients most likely to respond to a drug. Ultimately, physicians hope to be able to screen a patient’s tumor and choose the most effective drug based on its specific genetic profile.

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Fine-tuning Cancer Treatments