No more scraping Jochen Tack / Alamy Stock Photo

Defrosting car windows is a frequent cause of headaches for winter drivers, but now researchers have come up with a solar-powered solution.

Thomas Schutzius at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and his colleagues have developed a nanoscale-thick coating made from gold and titanium dioxide. The tightly-packed gold particles are good absorbers of sunlight and embedding them in titanium dioxide enhances this absorption.

The material fights ice by concentrating solar energy into a small volume, raising the temperature at its surface and leading to rapid defrosting. This coat can be deposited on glass …