Tech Scrape

A new method could help macular degeneration patients avoid regular injections into the eye. The pharmaceutical giant Genzyme has started a clinical trial to see whether a drug to treat macular generation could be delivered via long-lasting gene therapy rather than monthly injections.

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 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.

A DOE roadmap marks a return to research on a source of fuel that was once thought too costly. This week the U.S. Department of Energy released a new roadmap for the development of algal biofuels. DOE researchers had dismissed this type of biofuel as too costly to be commercially successful in the mid-1990s following a nearly two-decade-long research project.

Intel unveils a circuit that can pump out truly random numbers at high speed. It might sound like the last thing you need in a precise piece of hardware, but engineers at Intel are pretty pleased to have found a way to build a circuit capable of random behavior into computer processors.

A startup hopes implanted insulin-producing cells will free diabetics from insulin injections. Implants containing specially wrapped insulin-producing cells derived from embryonic stem cells can regulate blood sugar in mice for several months, according to research presented this month at the International Society for Stem Cell Research conference in San Francisco. San Diego-based ViaCyte (formerly Novocell), which is developing the implant as a treatment for type 1 diabetes, is now beginning the safety testing required for approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration before human testing can start.