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.

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

The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv this week Quantum Energy Teleportation with a Linear Harmonic Chain

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 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.

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.

Device drivers account for most crashes and even introduce security problems; a new testing tool could provide an early warning. Computers often need to be connected to printers, cameras, and USB flash drives and other hardware, but the small pieces of software that enable communications with these peripherals, known as “device drivers,” have a bad reputation. Experts believe that device driver failures are responsible for about 85 percent of crashes on Windows machines, and poorly written device drivers can also introduce security holes on an otherwise protected computer. Part of the problem is that a device driver can’t easily be examined by anyone outside the company that created it.

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.