Tech Scrape

The new design could lead to cheaper solar cells. A material with a novel nanostructure developed by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley could lead to lower-cost solar cells and light detectors. It absorbs light just as well as commercial thin-film solar cells but uses much less semiconductor material.

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.

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.

A new manufacturing approach could end the junking of several chips when one fails. Using springs and glue instead of solder to make electronic connections between computer chips could end one of the electronics industry’s most wasteful habits, say researchers at the Palo Alto Research Center and Oracle.

Fibers that carry light and sense pressure could be used for medical imaging and structural monitoring. Researchers at MIT have developed optical fibers that not only carry and modulate light, but also generate and sense pressure changes. The multifunctional fibers could be used to make various types of sensors. The fibers can also be squeezed in a way that modulates an optical signal, making them promising for “smart” textiles.

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

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.

The company is developing crops that tolerate salty soils. Around the world, a billion acres of agricultural land lay abandoned. In the United States, 15 million acres of cropland falls under this category. Decades of repeated irrigation and declining water quality have made much of this once-productive land too salty to support plant growth. Among the strategies to put this land back to use is to develop crops that can tolerate high-salinity soils.