Most Americans want the U.S. to place more emphasis on developing solar power, recent polls suggest.

A major impediment, however, is the cost to manufacture, install and maintain solar panels. Simply put, most people and businesses cannot afford to place them on their rooftops.

A cross-border research initiative on thin film photovoltaics by ECN, Holst Centre, imec, TNO, TU Eindhoven and FZ Jülich - has achieved a world first with a new inkjet printing process for manufacturing environmentally friendly OPV cells that deliver benchmark efficiency. Completely compatible with existing manufacturing technology, the process replaces toxic chlorinated solvents with more benign alternatives. The result builds on a combined achievement of Solliance and French OPV manufacturer DisaSolar, and was also supported by the EU FP7 project X10D.

All natural materials have a positive index of refraction – the degree to which they refract light. The nanoscale artificial "atoms" that constitute the metamaterial prism shown here, however, were designed to exhibit a negative index of refraction, and skew the light to the left. Technology that manipulates light in such unnatural ways could one day lead to invisibility cloaks.

Working together with the Empa and the Swiss Paraplegic Centre, Schoeller Medical develops a special sheet that assists in the prevention of bedsores and takes the Techtextil Innovation Prize 2013 in the category "New Applications".

Three NDSU researchers will make presentations at two international Radio Frequency Identification conferences from April 30 to May 2 in Orlando, Fla. Val Marinov, Cherish Bauer-Reich and Layne Berge will present research at "RFID Journal LIVE!"and at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers International Conference on RFID, to highlight NDSU technology breakthroughs.

Future storage systems based on atomic-scale memory would be capable of storing massive amounts of Big Data

GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS® certifies movie as World's Smallest Stop-Motion Film

Scientists dress neurons in fluorescence to study why they die

A small group of elusive neurons in the brain's cortex play a big role in ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), a swift and fatal neurodegenerative disease that paralyzes its victims. But the neurons have always been difficult to study because there are so few of them and they look so similar to other neurons in the cortex.

Chicago-area physicists among front-runners in race to observe dark-matter particle

Northwestern University physicist Eric Dahl is part of a group of physicists that has just launched an unusual new experiment in an attempt to be the first to directly confirm the existence of dark matter.

The market for solar modules is highly competitive. For this reason, companies must save on costs, such as by using a new process. It embeds the cells twice as fast into their protective plastic sheathing – and therefore saves time and money.

Around 17 million people in Germany suffer from impaired hearing. For many of them, their hearing is so damaged that a standard hearing aid is no longer enough. A new device will improve patients' hearing and can be implanted during outpatient surgery.

UV lamps are used to cure coatings and adhesives in many industrial manufacturing processes. And special sensors are used to measure the intensity of the UV light applied to these surfaces. But because these sensors age too quickly, they can only be used to record intermittent measurements. Fraunhofer researchers have developed a new generation of sensors capable of continuously monitoring UV intensity. These devices will be presented for the fi rst time at the Sensor + Test trade show in Nuremberg, from May 14 to 16 (Hall 12, Booth 537).

Production processes are becoming increasingly complex and effective. Fraunhofer researchers are presenting a new form of laser-based material processing at the LASER World of Photonics Trade Fair and Congress in Munich from 13-16 May 2013 (Hall C2, Booth 330). For the first time, surfaces can be treated, then imperfections detected and immediately corrected in a single step.