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Formlabs is bringing down the costs of a better 3-D printing technique, but must survive a patent lawsuit. Desktop 3-D printers are about to become available with higher-definition capabilities, with a new startup shipping its first model this month.

A hydrocarbon-sorting material could replace energy-intensive oil refining steps. A new material that sorts hydrocarbon molecules by shape could lower the cost of gasoline and also make the fuel safer by reducing the need for certain additives that have been linked to cancer, according to a paper in the next issue of the journal Science.

Spacecraft could determine their position anywhere in the solar system to within five kilometres using signals from x-ray pulsars, say astronomers.

Spacecraft could determine their position anywhere in the solar system to within five kilometres using signals from x-ray pulsars, say astronomers.

Tesla Motors’s loan repayment is a bright spot for the DOE loan program. Tesla CEO Elon Musk hinted it would happen, and now it’s happened. Tesla, the electric car maker, has paid off the DOE loan that allowed it to build a factory and start building and selling its Model S electric car. And it’s done so years ahead of schedule (see “Musk Says Tesla Will Pay Off It’s Loans in Half the Time”).

The first major conference for the digital currency suggests it is gaining legitimacy, but in a manner disappointing to some early enthusiasts. This past Sunday, Doug Scribner took out five $100 bills and began feeding them into what looked like a small, white ATM in San Jose Conference Center in California. The machine swallowed the bills smartly and credited him with an equivalent value in Bitcoins, an intangible, digital currency that is backed by not gold or any government, but by math.

A job invented in Silicon Valley is going mainstream as more industries try to gain an edge from big data. The job description “data scientist” didn’t exist five years ago. No one advertised for an expert in data science, and you couldn’t go to school to specialize in the field. Today, companies are fighting to recruit these specialists, courses on how to become one are popping up at many universities, and the Harvard Business Review even proclaimed that data scientist is the “sexiest” job of the 21st century.

Samsung’s technology for ultrafast data speeds currently requires a truckload of equipment. The world’s biggest cell-phone maker, Samsung, caused a stir last week by announcing an ultrafast wireless technology that it unofficially dubbed “5G.” And the technology has, in fact, been tested on the streets of New York.

An Australian team unveils the fundamental building block of a scalable quantum computer that could be embedded in today’s silicon chips Back in the late 90s, a physicist in Australia put forward a design for a quantum computer. Bruce Kane suggested that phosphorus atoms embedded in silicon would be the ideal way to store and manipulate quantum information.

In Washington, CEO Tim Cook defended Apple’s R&D cost sharing arrangements. Apple CEO Tim Cook came under fire in Washington today at a U.S. Senate hearing focused on the elaborate strategies Apple used to avoid paying tens of billions of dollars in corporate taxes.

Upgraded robot vision will be just one of the uses for the new version of Microsoft’s gesture control camera. Microsoft announced a new version of its Xbox games console today, the Xbox One, and with it an improved and essentially reinvented version of Kinect, the company’s body- and gesture-control sensor. That bodes well for Xbox gamers, but also for the community of hackers that have found so many original uses for the first Kinect, from robot vision to 3-D doodling (see “Hackers Take the Kinect to New Levels”). It seems likely that a new wave of Kinect hacking activity will begin as soon as the new device becomes available.

Pinpoint predictions are a long way off, but taking into account daily odds might help make the public more alert. The devastation in Moore, Oklahoma, shows the limits of sensing, modeling and warning technologies. While some technologies promise somewhat more-accurate hurricane tracks and thus sharper evacuation orders (see “A Model for Hurricane Evacuation”), tornado warnings are another story altogether (see “The Limits of Tornado Predictions”).

Can cultural factors be more important than censorship in shaping Chinese surfing habits? Two researchers argue that a new study of the way global websites cluster together supports this idea

Can cultural factors be more important than censorship in shaping Chinese surfing habits? Two researchers argue that a new study of the way global websites cluster together supports this idea

Can cultural factors be more important than censorship in shaping Chinese surfing habits? Two researchers argue that a new study of the way global websites cluster together supports this idea

A techie’s San Francisco home has its own Twitter feed. Will yours be next? At first glance, you’d never guess there’s anything unusual about Tom Coates’s San Francisco home. Nestled at the end of a narrow passageway on a side street, it’s a peaceful, sunny house decorated with modern furniture and bright posters that say things like “Machines help us work” and “Make your own path.”

A techie’s San Francisco home has its own Twitter feed. Will yours be next? At first glance, you’d never guess there’s anything unusual about Tom Coates’s San Francisco home. Nestled at the end of a narrow passageway on a side street, it’s a peaceful, sunny house decorated with modern furniture and bright posters that say things like “Machines help us work” and “Make your own path.”

Jolla Mobile, formed by Nokia refugees, launches a phone with interchangable back-panels and the Sailfish OS Almost one year after Nokia’s bloodletting, in which it cut 10,000 jobs and closed research and manufacturing facilities (see “Nokia Forced to Take Drastic Measures”), we’re starting to see new fruits of the startup culture that rose from the wreckage.

Hardware that tracks your head, eyes and hands will make the follow up to Second Life very different to the pioneering virtual world. The founder of once-popular virtual world Second Life, Philip Rosedale, is working on a new 3D digital world that looks like it will be operated using gestures and body-tracking hardware. Rosedale declined to talk about his new company, called High Fidelity, just yet. But videos and other material posted online by the company suggest it is working on an impressively immersive virtual reality experience where you control an avatar using head and hand movements.

A $300 million project seems to have failed to produce a cheap way to make fuel from algae. In 2009, ExxonMobil announced that it would pay Craig Venter’s Synthetic Genomics up to $300 million to develop algae-based fuels.

The ability to copy electronic code makes one-time pads vulnerable to hackers. Now engineers have found a way round this to create a system of cryptography that is invulnerable to electronic attack

The world’s largest chip maker wants to see a new kind of economy bloom around personal data. Intel is a $53-billion-a-year company that enjoys a near monopoly on the computer chips that go into PCs. But when it comes to the data underlying big companies like Facebook and Google, it says it wants to “return power to the people.”

A 19th-century idea might lead to cleaner cars, larger-scale renewable energy. Some engineers are dusting off an old idea for storing energy—using electricity to liquefy air by cooling it down to nearly 200 °C below zero. When power is needed, the liquefied air is allowed to warm up and expand to drive a steam turbine and generator.

The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv preprint server Performance of a Remotely Located Muon Radiography System to Identify the Inner Structure of a Nuclear Plant

What was it like to use a wearable computer back in 1999?

The following View from the Marketplace was provided by SAP, the sponsor of our Big Data Gets Personal Business Report.

Glass apps will require people to create new content filters. Maybe that’s just a losing battle. Would you want your daily horoscope beamed to your right eye? That’s the vision of the future I saw when I tried out the fashion magazine Elle’s app for Google Glass yesterday, one of several apps announced at the extravagant software developer love-fest the internet company puts on every year.

Otherfab’s Kickstarter project offers an easy way to make custom circuit boards at home.

Building solar and wind projects in the wrong place is wasting billions of dollars in Europe. Siemens says it would make sense to build solar power plants in sunny countries in Europe rather than in cloudy ones. And wind turbines should be built in windy places.

The mental fuzziness induced by cancer treatment could be eased by cognitive exercises performed online, say researchers. Long-term cancer survivors who use a brain-training program for 12 weeks are more cognitively flexible, verbally fluent and are faster thinkers than survivors who did not train, report investigators.

The mental fuzziness induced by cancer treatment could be eased by cognitive exercises performed online, say researchers. Long-term cancer survivors who use a brain-training program for 12 weeks are more cognitively flexible, verbally fluent and are faster thinkers than survivors who did not train, report investigators.