Tech Scrape

Engineered stem cells carry markers of their former identities–a trait that could hinder research into diseases. While reprogrammed stem cells –those derived from fully differentiated adult cells–can be transformed into any type of tissue, scientists have now discovered that they preserve a memory of where they came from. That memory appears to influence the cells’ development; reprogrammed stem cells are more easily converted back to their original identity, according to a study released online today in Nature . The findings could affect research into the two main uses for reprogrammed stem cells; growing efforts to study disease in cells derived from patients with those diseases, and the development of replacement cell therapies.

Search engines get smarter at predicting when we’ll respond to a pitch. Bing users might not notice, but the Microsoft search engine tends to show fewer advertisements alongside search results than its rivals do. The reason might be that advertisers are drawn more to Google, but Microsoft says the difference also comes from an artificial-intelligence technique that aims to deliver only the most relevant ads.

New algorithms show how a landmark work evolved. Enhancements to image-processing technologies for colorizing black-and-white images is helping curators divine the colors used by the French artist Henri Matisse on his landmark work Bathers by a River –while the painting was still a work in progress

Financial services are reaching the world’s poorest by mobile phone. Thanks to a mobile banking system launched last month in Senegal, people with no previous access to bank accounts were able to watch the World Cup via satellite services that they paid for electronically with a few taps on a mobile phone. The service is a clear sign that mobile banking is taking off in Africa, giving some of the world’s poorest people a way to access financial services.

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.

The race is on to create an app store compatible with all devices and operating systems. In a talk delivered last Wednesday at the Mozilla Summit in Whistler, Canada, Pascal Finette, director of Mozilla Labs, asked an audience of more than 150 Web developers a hypothetical question: what would an “open” Web app store look like? The answer could play an important role in the future of personal computing.

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.

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.