An interesting though brief patent interference case concerning flat-panel solar concentrators.   The plaintiff (Morgan) had filed a continuation patent application, which is a means of getting additional claims out of a previously-filed specification.  The new patent gets the same priority date as the old one, so you don't have to worry about later art (such as that of the competitor whom you want to pay you royalties), but you don't get the usual 20-year patent lifetime.  Morgan then came after Banyan.

It isn't easy defending an IP lawsuit in the Eastern District of Texas.

Drift and 1/f Noise at 70-90 °C
Sometimes you have to find out things that aren't in the datasheet, and even the manufacturer may not know.

Thermoacoustic fridges are magic: you heat one end, and the other end gets cold. (Of course you have to sink all that heat from the middle.) They can easily be made long and skinny, and so are a natural for use down drillholes. They're also made entirely of metal, and have no moving parts, so they will survive bouncing around in the back of a truck.

Use of my laser noise canceller to achieve shot-noise limited performance in SPR spectroscopy (in cooperation with Xi Wang and Andre Knoesen of UC Davis, and a bunch of my friends at IBM Almaden Research Center).