This week’s podcast comes to you not from The World newsroom in Boston, but the one in London. And since I’m here, let’s load up the show with some tech goodies from this side of the Big Pond. We lead with a podcast exclusive: an interview with bioinformatician David Aanensen, who works in the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College in London. He and his team have created an app for the Google Android operating system called EpiCollect. The idea is elegantly simple: many scientists are out in the field gathering information on different infectious disease organisms worldwide. Much of that data ends up in databases at Imperial College. Geography is often of significance in comparing disease organisms across the planet. So, why not devise an open source smartphone app that allows the user in the field to enter relevent information directly into the phone, where it is automatically geo-tagged by the phone’s on-board GPS? Then, when there is a strong mobile data signal, the information on phone will synch directly back to the main database back in the lab. Indeed, why not?

We’ve also got an in-depth look at the present and future of the electric car. You can read more about the latest in electric car technology here and here. And here and here.

And we end with an interesting little cross-atlantic look at how politicians are using Twitter. You can check out Jennifer Golbeck’s research here.

We happen to be on Twitter ourselves, along with Facebook and FriendFeed.

This week’s musical guest: The 5th Dimension with “Up, Up and Away in My Beautiful Balloon.”