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Usually, electricity pylons are, well…boring. Very boring. They are, after all, designed for utility – they are girder structures that hold up our precious electrical wires.  They don’t need to be cool or beautiful, right? Wrong. Iceland is currently hosting a competition for new designs for the nation’s electrical pylons. One of the finalists is Choi+Shine, a firm from Boston. They’ve come up with the idea to build electricity pylons in the shape of, yes, giant humanoids. Imagine them striding across Iceland like you see above. In our podcast this week, we’ve got an interview with Jin Choi and Thomas Shine. Find out what inspired the project they call “The Land of Giants.”

Another highlight from the podcast this week is a segment looking at North Korea’s attempts to use YouTube and Twitter to spread what it calls news, what the West calls propaganda, to the outside world. For a glimpse inside a world we rarely see, take a look at North Korea’s YouTube Channel. You can also follow North Korea on Twitter. To put all of this in perspective, we turn to Hazel Smith, a long-time North Korea researcher at Cranfield University in Britain. And here’s the radio piece I did for the Big Show (4 minutes or so). There’s already been an update to the story: South Korea has decided to block North Korea’s Twitter feed!

The flooding in Pakistan is dominating the news right now. Although it’s not strictly technology, we feature a piece that looks at how the Indus river has been managed (or mismanaged) and engineered over the years. The piece features Daanish Mustafa of King’s College in London. Mustafa’s got a whole set of interesting ideas that could be implemented to help ensure that flooding of this magnitude could at least be slightly mitigated. One idea that will be familiar to Tech Podcast listeners — an early warning system for flooding based on cell phones!

We’ll also head to Vietnam to hear about the government’s attempts to control what citizens can see and say online. For more, you can read a nice write-up on the current state of Internet filtering in Vietnam, courtesy of the Open Net Initiative up in Toronto.

And don’t forget to check out Rhitu Chatterjee’s Science Forum with the Einstein@Home guys — good stuff!

Remember, you can follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

(Photo: Choi Shine)