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• Why Google Kept Motorola’s Research Lab

  Motorola Mobility’s sale to Lenovo only looks like a loss—the patents were cheap, and Google might yet advance wearables, home devices, and modular phone hardware.

  Google’s $2.9 billion sale of Motorola Mobility to Chinese PC maker Lenovo might seem like lousy business, given Google’s $12.5 billion purchase in 2012 and losses of $1 billion in the interim. But it leaves Google with a mobile research unit and a war chest of patents arguably bought at a very good price. And it gives a boost to Android in developing countries.

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• Burning the U.K.’s Plutonium Stockpile Could Fast-Track New Reactors

  GE’s nuclear waste-burning PRISM reactors get a new chance at commercialization.

  Pressure to reduce the U.K.’s plutonium stockpile, along with generous premiums for new nuclear power generation, is breathing new life into a decades-old reactor design—GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy’s Power Reactor Innovative Small Module, or PRISM, technology. PRISM is a fast reactor, whose speedy neutrons can break down waste from spent nuclear fuel.

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• Solar Thermal Technology Poses Challenges for Drought-Stricken California

  Reducing water consumption at solar thermal plants raises costs and decreases power production.

  California’s ambitious goal of getting a third of its electricity from renewable energy sources by 2030 is being tested by its driest year on record, part of a multiyear drought that’s seriously straining water supplies. The state plan relies heavily on solar thermal technology, but this type of solar power also typically consumes huge quantities of water.

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• Q&A: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston

  How the wunderkind of cloud storage deals with government snooping and recruits more geeks.

  Dropbox, the popular cloud storage system that lets people drag files to an icon that puts that data in the cloud and sync new versions across multiple devices (see “Hiding All the Complexities of Remote File Storage Behind a Small Blue Box”), recently got $250 million in new funding, giving it a $10 billion valuation.

• Monkeys Modified with Genome Editing

  Macaques in China are the first primates born with genomes engineered by precision gene-targeting methods.

  Researchers at Nanjing Medical University and Yunnan Key Laboratory of Primate Biomedical Research in Kunming, China, have created genetically modified monkeys using a new method of DNA engineering known as Crispr. The infant macaques show that targeted genome editing is feasible in primates—a potential boon for scientists studying complex diseases, including neurological ones, and an advance that suggests that the method could one day work in humans. The work was reported in the journal Cell on Thursday.

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• The Future of Personal Entertainment, In Your Face

  The Glyph headset is weird-looking and expensive, but amazingly immersive.

  I’m watching a jellyfish pump past me lazily, its movement interrupting the twinkling of underwater particles, when a sea turtle suddenly swims my way and starts munching on the jellyfish’s tentacles.

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• “Honey Encryption” Will Bamboozle Attackers with Fake Secrets

  A new approach to encryption beats attackers by presenting them with fake data.

  Ari Juels, an independent researcher who was previously chief scientist at computer security company RSA, thinks something important is missing from the cryptography protecting our sensitive data: trickery.

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• A 96-Antenna System Tests the Next Generation of Wireless

  Rice University is testing a highly efficient wireless communications system.

  Even as the world’s carriers build out the latest wireless infrastructure, known as 4G LTE, a new apparatus bristling with 96 antennas taking shape at a Rice University lab in Texas could help define the next generation of wireless technology.

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• Audi Bets on Bio Gasoline Startup

  Startup Global Bioenergies uses genetic engineering to avoid one of the costliest steps in biofuel production.

  Audi is investing in a startup, Paris-based Global Bioenergies, that says it can make cheap gasoline from sugar and other renewable sources. The strategic partnership includes stock options and an unspecified amount of funding.

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• An AI Pal That Is Better Than “Her”

  The charming automated assistant in Spike Jonze’s new movie isn’t realistic. But if they were designed thoughtfully, computerized interlocutors could make us better people.

  In the movie Her, which was nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture this year, a middle-aged writer named Theodore Twombly installs and rapidly falls in love with an artificially intelligent operating system who christens herself Samantha.

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• Startup Thinks Its Battery Will Solve Renewable Energy’s Big Flaw

  Aquion has started production of a low-cost sodium-ion battery aimed at making renewable energy viable.

  A former Sony TV factory near Pittsburgh is coming to life again after lying idle for four years. Whirring robotic arms have started to assemble a new kind of battery that could make the grid more efficient and let villages run on solar power around the clock.

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