Researchers envision mass-produced rolls of material that converts sunlight to electricity

Princeton electrical engineers have invented a technique for making solar cells that, when combined with other recent advances, could yield a highly economical source of energy.

The results, reported in the Sept. 11 issue of Nature, move scientists closer to making a new class of solar cells that are not as efficient as conventional ones, but could be vastly less expensive and more ver

The 35,000 or so genes within a human cell are something like players on a sports team: If their activity isn’t controlled and coordinated, the result can be disastrous.

So just as coaches tell individual players when to scramble onto the field and when to stay on the bench, molecules called transcription factors prompt particular genes to be active or stay quiet. Transcription factors occur naturally in cells, but researchers have been working to develop artificial transcriptio

In the Sept. 13 issue of The Lancet, Johns Hopkins and Ugandan researchers report final results of a study showing that a safe, simple and inexpensive treatment reduces transmission of HIV from mothers to babies during childbirth and the first few weeks of life, offering a good chance to curb the spread of HIV.

In their study of more than 600 women in Uganda, giving one dose of nevirapine, a common HIV-fighting drug, to HIV-positive mothers during labor, and one dose to their newborns, redu

MIT scientists have cooled a sodium gas to the lowest temperature ever recorded – only half-a-billionth of a degree above absolute zero. The work, to be reported in the Sept. 12 issue of Science, bests the previous record by a factor of six, and is the first time that a gas was cooled below 1 nanokelvin (one-billionth of a degree).

“To go below one nanokelvin is a little like running a mile under four minutes for the first time,” said Nobel laureate Wolfgang Ketterle, co-leader of the team.

Using phone numbers, remote controls and computer keyboards will likely seem quaint within a decade as new capability to turn human speech into accurate, efficient computer code radically changes the ways we live and work.

That’s the outlook of Lawrence R. Rabiner, associate director of the Center for Advanced Information Processing (CAIP) at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, in an overview of speech processing, “The Power of Speech,” in the journal Science, available Friday

One of the great frustrations of modern medicine is the creeping ability of pathogenic microbes to develop resistance to the antibiotics we throw at them.

More and more, microbes are able to eliminate, modify and sequester the toxic molecules that make up the arsenal of antibiotics that humans use to treat infection, making once-miraculous drugs increasingly impotent. Now, adding to the mix of devices dangerous microbes deploy to evade destruction by antibiotics, scientists have disc