New York Times: The Obama administration and the European Union have each decided to negotiate settlements involving China’s $30-billion-a-year exports of solar panels. The Financial Times reports that the EU in particular has faced pressure from the German government, because Chinese premier Li Keqiang will visit Germany next week. The proposed settlement, which might take months to negotiate, splits the globe into regional markets and eliminates steep import duties on Chinese solar panels. The price of panels will rise naturally: Quotas will be introduced which in turn, might make solar power less competitive with fossil fuels. In the past four years, a glut of solar panels from China has caused prices to collapse globally by 75% and has driven some US companies like Solyndra into bankruptcy. The cheap prices were fueled by massive subsidies from the Chinese local, state, and national governments. Under US and EU laws, the domestic solar panel industry must agree to the terms before the settlement is finalized. However, it is not certain that China will accept the proposal, and if no settlement is signed by 5 December, then EU tariffs against Chinese solar panels automatically go into effect.

BBC: The Mars rover Curiosity, launched by NASA in 2011, has used its drilling system for the first time. In its initial foray, it hammered out a visible indentation on the surface of Gale Crater, where the craft landed last August. Once the craft has located a suitable site, multiple test holes will be drilled, using both hammering and rotating action. The goal is to obtain a powdered sample that can be picked up and delivered to Curiosity’s onboard laboratories. So far scientists have been able to determine that the rock is sedimentary and that water was probably involved in its formation.

New York Times: Surgeons face a number of difficulties when they carry out gallbladder or prostate surgery. For one thing, the operations require numerous delicate incisions, and the surgeons frequently end up with back problems from leaning over their patients for hours on end. Over the past 10 years, robotic arms that a surgeon can control using a joystick and a television screen have become increasingly popular. Not only do they require smaller incisions, not much larger than a keyhole, but also fewer of them. That could lead to faster recovery, said Michael Hsieh, a Stanford University professor and urologist, to the New York Times. “There’s only one wound to heal with this procedure, rather than three.” But robotic systems cost much more than traditional equipment, and whether the technology is worth the extra money remains to be seen.

NPR: Scientists working on NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover have some exciting new results but aren’t prepared to reveal them. The reason, says principal investigator John Grotzinger to NPR’s Joe Palca, is that they want to make sure their results are truly a groundbreaking discovery—and not a fluke or an error. It’s a bind scientists frequently find themselves in: It is their nature to share results, but no one likes to make a big announcement and then have to retract it later. One of the most infamous errors to date involved the announcement of the discovery of one of the first exoplanets, which was later discredited when it was found that researchers had failed to include Earth’s orbit around the Sun in their observations. Another was the faster-than-light neutrinos announcement, which was eventually attributed to faulty equipment. The new NASA discovery will have to wait several more weeks until the data are rechecked and submitted to a journal for publication.