Scientific American: Although solar cell technology for converting the sun’s power into electricity has improved steadily in recent years, high costs and inefficiencies have kept it from being a serious replacement for fossil fuels. A few high-tech heavyweights–IBM, Intel and Hewlett-Packard (HP)–hope to change this using the same formula of mass production and commoditization that helped them make personal computers mainstream over the past three decades. IBM last week announced plans to make solar …