This is Malte Spitz, German Green Party politician and cell phone user. Super user, actually. Recently, he started wondering just how much data his cell phone company had on him. So, he asked for it. And under German Constitutional Law, the company had to fork it over. Spitz then took the data, all six months of it, and it available to the German newspaper “Die Zeit,” which took it and made an intriguing, some might say frightening, visualization of it. Not hard, considering Spitz cell phone was registered and logged by a local cell phone tower no fewer than 35,000 times in that six month period. In this episode of The World’s Technology Podcast, we’ll feature an interview with Spitz, and find out why he asked for his information, and what he intends to do now. You can read, and hear, a longer interview with Malte Spitz over at Deutsche Welle‘s Spectrum program.

Also on this program, we’ll do a survey of how countries that currently use nuclear power, and those that had plans to, are feeling in the wake of the ongoing crisis at the Fukushima plant in Japan. It all raises the question of risk assessment, not just with nuclear power, but with all the things that we might have cause to fear in our lives. To give us some perspective, we’ve got an interview with Dan Gardner, author of Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear.

Haven’t you always wanted to take a peak inside Virgin Galactic’s commercial spacecraft? I know I do. Luckily, the BBC was granted access to get inside the craft, and we’ll have the report. If you’ve got $200,000 to spare, it just might be a sweet, if short, ride.

And here’s a question: how would you like to help the FBI solve a cold case? Well, you might have to know a bit about cryptography, or not. No one’s really sure if the scraps of paper left behind at a 1999 crime scene are encrypted clues, or just gibberish. So, they’ve made the notes available online, and are asking for the public’s help.

Finally, we pay tribute to a giant of stickiness, Harry Coover. Coover worked with cyanoacrylates, and that work eventually gave rise to the product we all know and love (and hate), Super Glue. Coover passed away this week at the age of 94. He had more than 400 patents, and was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2010.

Remember, you can always join the fun on our Facebook fan page, or follow us on Twitter.

(Photo: German Green Party)

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.”

Download MP3

I’ve been doing this podcast for a long time now (four and half years, give or take an episode), and it never fails. The best, most original parts of the show are always suggested by you, the listeners. So, hats off to long-time WTP fan Gabor Kovacs, who not only sends along great story ideas from time to time, but also hosts Electrical Language, his own indie music podcast. Gabor sent me an email earlier this week, and told me to look into Embrace, a low-cost incubator made from phase change materials. The idea, as you can see, is to create a kind of sleeping bag for a low-birth-weight or premature baby. The bag is designed to hold a constant, warm temperature for four hour stretches. This can greatly improve the chances for the baby’s survival. Twenty million low-birth-weight babies are born each year, mostly in rural areas in the developing world that don’t have access to high-end incubators. Hence, the hope that the Embrace could help. We catch up with Linus Liang, one of the co-founders of the non-profit. Listen in to find out how the technology works, and how the field testing is going in India.

Our other big story this week also overlaps the boundaries of tech, science and public health. Researchers in Thailand have reported an AIDS vaccine trial which seems to show, for the first time ever, the prevention of infection. The results are modest, but it is spurring hope for a more effective vaccine to combat HIV/AIDS. I would be remiss if I didn’t include news like this in the podcast, in my humble opinion.

Then, on to worms…Scottish worms to be precise. Scientists are, wait for it, doing a worm census in Scotland. Why? Well, it turns out that those little earth engineers just might be able to tell us the effects of climate change on our environment. We speak with one of the Roy Neilson, one of the scientists involved in The Great Scottish Worm Count.

And we end with a cell phone symphony in Mumbai that was “conducted” by German soundartist Hans Koch and “performed” by, well, the audience. We couldn’t make this stuff up if we tried, could we?

Remember, we’re on Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed.