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You don’t have to be a fan of Spider-Man to know that an arachnid’s silk is some pretty powerful stuff. After all, its tensile strength is close to that of high-grade steel. But is turns out that the strength of a spider’s web is about more than just the silk. Some new research from MIT suggests that its also the material’s combination of strength *and* stretchiness. In this week’s tech podcast, you’ll hear all about the research, and its possible implications for human building and design.

Also in this episode: you’ll hear about a German company that’s taken to the web, and to apps, to help drivers and passengers share rides. It’s called Mitfahrgelegenheit, or Carpooling.com for you non-German speakers.

We’ll also bring you the story of one Texas technology company, Eolas, that created quite a legal stir in the online world. Plus, how a virtual reality game helped one Afghanistan vet deal with the pain of horrific burns.

And we end with a lovely mini-documentary on that little block-filled game you love to hate: Tetris!

A reminder that you can ignore us equally on Twitter, Facebook, and now Google +.

(Photo: Duk)

We start 2012 with a fantastic B-side podcast. The BBC’s Peter Curran takes us on a tour of a giant silver donut in the English countryside. Sounds yummy, right? Well, just wait until you hear about the tech and the science inside the Diamond Light Source, the UK’s national synchrotron. As you’ll hear, these scientists take their infra-red and x-rays very seriously. So seriously that they have their own podcast!

And we should note: with the new year comes a new way to savor the joys of the tech podcast. We have created a mobile app that can be used with most smartphones and tablet devices, including Android, iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and Windows Phone. Just follow this link with your mobile browser, and then either download or “add to home screen” as preferred. Not only can you automagically access the latest podcast, but you can also read the show notes, and follow WTP on Twitter and Facebook. One stop shopping, as they say, for Tech That Matters.

A reminder that you can ignore us equally on Twitter, Facebook, and now Google +.

We’ve got some inspirational tech stories this week on the podcast. First up, this is a Katherine Bomkamp, a student at West Virginia University. In interviews, Ms. Bomkamp says she likes the normal student activities: hanging out with friends, going to parties, etc. But, she’s also an entrepreneur with her own company. When she was 16, she was inspired to help veterans who suffer from phantom-limb pain. Now, four years later, she’s well on her way to developing a prosthetic device that she believes can help them. It’s called the Pain Free Socket, and you can hear Bomkamp talk about it in this week’s edition of the best kept secret in podcasting, the World’s Technology Podcast.

Also, we’ve got another great inspirational item on a project called Random Hacks of Kindness, and we’ll also have an in-depth look at the Satellite Sentinel Project.

For those who prefer a bit of fear to inspiration, we’ll also take a look at the raging debate over how the rules of war apply when the war moves online.

A reminder that you can ignore us equally on Twitter, Facebook, and now Google +.

(Photo: Greg Ellis for WVU)

Who says that robots have to be tall, dark, humanoid and metallic? Certainly not George W. Whitesides and his team at Harvard. They’ve created a whole new set of robots that take their cues from worms and starfish, not Arnie and the Terminator. These soft, flexible and squishy ‘bots can do all manner of interesting maneuvers. The hope is that they will be able to go where few other kinds of robots can. In this week’s tech podcast, you’ll hear Professor Whitesides talk about the advantages these robots have. We can’t resist giving you this video sampler as well:

There’s also this:

Also in the podcast this week, we’ll hear about two compounds that have been very much in use, and in the news, both in the United States and elsewhere: pepper spray and tear gas. One of the inventors of modern pepper spray tells us why he’s now speaking out about its use. We’ll also hear from an expert on tear gas.

We also will tell you about some research on the development of a new kind of contact lens – one that might be able to actually project your email right in front of your eyeballs. And we’ll end with a check-in one of WTP’s favorite stories, Bletchley Park in the UK. Anchor Marco Werman speaks with Sue Black, who is fighting to save the building and the grounds where British code-breakers cracked German codes during World War II. Truly, tech that still matters.

A reminder that you can ignore us equally on Twitter, Facebook, and now Google +.

This is the Kiira, an electric vehicle that has been built and successfully tested by professors and students at Makerere University in Uganda. They’ve been working on it since about 2009. Most of the parts were built in Uganda, and the car was assembled there. Some are hailing it as proof that African science and technology is pushing forward at a rapid rate. Others…are not so sure it was money well spent. Listen in to episode 346, and you can decide for yourself. You’ll hear from some of those involved in the project.

The Kiira is one of three stories from Africa on the podcast this week. We’ll also bring you a story about the arrival of a new fiber optic cable in Liberia, and what it might mean for Internet access, and the country’s economy. The third story is about a unique project for recycling plastic bottles in Nigeria. How so? Well…how about using them to build a house. Yep, a house.

We’ll also talk about how a US company’s products have been implicated in Syria’s net crackdown, and in Burma as well. And you’ll hear about Instant WILD, a phone and web app that allows you to help scientists discover new animal species.

A reminder that you can ignore us equally on Twitter, Facebook, and now Google +.

Also in this episode, we’ll explore the legacy of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who 50 years ago became the first human being in space. We’ll hear from the Soviet side, and the American side, and we’ll give you some points to ponder in the manned vs. unmanned space exploration debate. Oh, and we’ll give you the world’s first space/earth flute duet. Awesome.

And we’ll end with the BBC’s Chris Vallance offering you an audio glimpse, if that makes sense, of Daphne Oram’s prototype electronic music production device, the Oramics Machine. It will go on display this summer in London’s Science Museum, but Chris gives us a preview.

Oh, and the theme music these days comes courtesy of Pennsylvania’s own The Ocean Blue. The track is called Ballerina Out of Control, from the album Cerulean. Top, top stuff.

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I spend the bulk of my time for the radio program, The Big Show, chasing my tail trying to bring you “all the latest news.” What’s great about the podcast is that it affords me, and therefore you, the chance to step back and get some historical context and perspective on the news. That’s what I’m doing this week with the ongoing nuclear crisis at Fukushima in Japan. Here you see a picture of the reactor at Chernobyl, encased in its concrete “sarcophagus.” That’s one of the places we will revisit, along with Three Mile Island in the United States, and the Tokaimura plant in Japan.

Yes, I’ll admit that WTP 324 will not be the most uplifting episode we’ve done. But it’s a fascinating glimpse into the past, and will hopefully arm you with some much-needed perspective amidst the daily deluge of breaking news.

To make up for the darkness, we will also feature a Tokyo blogger who is helping translate tweets from Japan during these difficult times.

(Photo: Elena Filatova)

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.

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(Photo: German Green Party)

This is an aerial shot of reactors three and four at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant in Japan, operated by the Tokyo Electric Power Company, TEPCO. It’s been the focus of global attention this past week, as operators try to prevent the leakage of radioactive material from the plant’s reactors. The nuclear fuel rods began to overheat earlier this week, after water from the post-quake tsunami swamped the electrical controls for the plant’s cooling system. Japanese officials have been trying a number of measures this week to try to cool things down, including dropping water on the reactors by helicopter, and swamping them with seawater. There have been a series of explosions at the reactors, prompting many to worry about a potentially catastrophic release of radioactive material. You can find the latest from the International Atomic Energy Agency here. TEPCO is providing plant status updates here. Around 50 TEPCO employees continue to battle the crisis at the plant.

In Tech Podcast 321, we’ll take a look at the nuclear crisis in Japan, and hope to provide you with some reality checks that will go beyond the hype and hyperbole.

One of our listeners asked on Twitter earlier this week about the use of robots in Japan during the post-quake and tsunami search and rescue, and any potential uses of ‘bots at Fukushima. Here’s what I’ve found so far.

If you really want to keep up with all the latest tech angles coming out of Japan, we suggest you join the Tech Podcast on Facebook, and/or Twitter.

Some foreign media organizations have made the comparisons (for example, here and here). Also implicitly making the connection was Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who has called the quake and its aftermath Japan’s worst crisis since World War Two. A further sign of the historical significance of the moment, and of the country’s plight: Japanese Emperor Akihito made the first television address of his reign.

That said, there are significant differences between the 1945 bombings and the earthquake. The most obvious is that the 1945 events were military attacks (though the vast majority of victims were civilians). The destruction of two cities and the radiation released was fully intended by Japan’s wartime enemy, the United States. Also, radiation levels today are nowhere near as high as in the aftermath of the bombings. Nor, so far, is the loss of life, as shockingly high as it is.

In the podcast I put together for the 65th anniversary of the dropping of the Atomic bombs, there are two takes on self-censorship. A child survivor of Hiroshima explains why she kept quiet about her experiences for so long, through the pain and guilt of survival. She was seven when the the bomb fell, killing her parents and siblings but inexplicably sparing her. Late in life, Sueko Hada tells her story, in the presence of her daughter and granddaughters. They’ve heard some of it before, but she includes many new details this time. I snapped the picture above of the family on the day I interviewed Mrs Hada in 2005. My report originally aired on The World as part of a series on the mental health of A-bomb survivors, known in Japan as hibakusha.

Before I met Mrs Hada, I don’t think I fully understood why people with painful pasts remain silent, essentially censoring their own histories. But if you grew up in post-war Japan, surrounded by people who believed that radiation sickness was contagious and hereditary, you too might keep quiet about your past.

The legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is hard to gauge. Japanese children still visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum (left). But these days, Tokyo Disneyland is a far more popular destination for school groups.

For many Americans, the use of the bomb remains a hugely sensitive issue. Views both pro and con seem entrenched, dialogue virtually impossible. The debate — such as it is — hasn’t progressed much since the 1995 controversy over The Smithsonian’s Enola Gay exhibition. But there has been new research about some of the earliest news reporting of the bombs. That began in 2005, when several dispatches written by Chicago Daily News reporter George Weller were published first time by the Tokyo newspaper Mainichi Shimbun. That was followed by publication in English of those and other reports in First into Nagasaki, a book put together by Weller’s son, Anthony.

Weller blamed U.S. military censorship for the previous non-publication of his reports. But Japanese freelance reporter Atsuko Shigesawa disputes that in a new book. (Japanese links here and here.) At the Library of Congress, she came across a statement from Gilbert Harrison, who was a sergeant in the US Army Air Forces and went to Nagasaki with Weller. Harrison went on to become editor of the New Republic. In his statement, he describes how he delivered Weller’s reports to a Chicago Daily News employee in Tokyo. As far as he knows, he says, the reports were filed there and then and were not subject to military vetting. He says he “doesn’t know why” the New York Times and the Arizona Republic reported in 2005 that “our reports were censored and not printed for 60 years.”

Atsuko Shigesawa believes that the true acts of censorship in reporting on the A-bombs were self-imposed, sometimes by reporters, sometimes by their editors. In Weller’s case, she believes his editors at the Chicago Daily News killed many of his stories. And when it came to other reporters filing stories from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Shigesawa found that newspapers routinely cut the segments dealing with radiation sickness and other after-effects of the bombs on the human body. (The photo to the right was taken at a hospital in Tokyo. The original caption reads: “The patient’s skin is burned in a pattern corresponding to the dark portions of a kimono worn at the time of the explosion.”) In addition to these editorial cuts, at least one correspondent chose not to report on his hospital visits, believing that they were part of a plot to hoodwink him. William Lawrence of the New York Times wrote that American reporters were being subjected to “a Japanese propaganda campaign calculated to shame Americans for using such a devastating weapon of war”. He continued: “I am convinced that, horrible as the bomb undoubtedly is, the Japanese are exaggerating its effects in an effort to win sympathy for themselves in an attempt to make the American people forget the long record of cold-blooded Japanese bestiality.” For those reasons, Lawrence did not write about his hospital visits and the cases of radiation sickness he witnessed until 1972, in his memoir.

We don’t — and probably never will — have the full story of what influenced those initial reports of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But there’s enough to suggest that self-censorship played a prominent role.

For another take on the meaning of Hiroshima and memory, check out Rahna Reiko Rizzuto’s memoir Hiroshima in the Morning. It is a 2010 finalist in the autobiography category of the National Book Critics’ Circle Award.

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As WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange continues his fight against extradition from Britain to Sweden, attention has now turned to man accused of giving WikiLeaks all of that classified information in the first place, Bradley Manning. This week, Manning was charged with 22 counts, including “aiding the enemy,” which is punishable by death. Prosecutors, however, said, they would not seek the death penalty in the case. For some, Manning is a pariah. For others, he is a hero. In this week’s podcast, we’ll hear from former CIA officer turned anti-war campaigner Raymond McGovern. Also, you’ll hear about One Day on Earth, a group that is doing all it can to ensure that videos shot in Libya during the recent crisis make it to the outside world.

On the lighter side, we’ll also discuss whether it might be time to tell students to put pen and paper down during exams, and let them use computers. Then, Cyrus Farivar takes us on a tour of the CeBit Trade Show in Hannover, Germany. Be sure to check out Spectrum, Cyrus’ weekly technology podcast for Deutsche Welle.

And finally, you’ll hear about some robot language teachers that are being used in South Korean schools.

For those who want more on old-time radio guru Gerry Wells, listener Ben Wolfram suggests you check out The Secret Life of Machines. And, for those who want to follow Dave Guezuraga’s trip by 400cc dirt bike through South East Asia, and then from Amsterdam to Magadan, Russia, you should really swing by his blog. Fun stuff, and he’s inspired me to keep making more episodes for him to listen to!

Remember, WTP is on Facebook, and on Twitter. Go on, be social with us!

(Photo: mar is sea Y)

Nobody likes to be wrong. But for most of us (OK, all of us), being wrong is just a fact of life. And then for some of us, it’s just our usual state of being. Luckily, author Kathryn Schulz, who bills herself as the world’s leading “wrongologist,” has written the book on wrong. It’s called Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. She also does a regular blog for Slate called “The Wrong Stuff” that is worth checking out as well. I interviewed Kathryn recently for an upcoming piece for the radio program. The interview was so right, however, that I’ve decided to make the whole thing available as a special edition of The World’s Technology Podcast. Is it strictly about technology? No, not really. But whether you are a technologist or an engineer, a doctor or a scientist, I think you’ll find some useful ideas in this podcast. After all, the best segments of the podcast are never about the technology anyway…my own personal #fail, I guess.

You should also feel free to leave your own story about being wrong below in the comments!

In the meantime, here’s a video from Kathryn’s talk at TED:

There is a comfort to thinking of the year of your country as the father or mother of the nation. And it’s not just countries with dictators that name their leaders in this way. Britain’s Margaret Thatcher was the Iron Lady (soon to be a biopic of the same name starring Meryl Streep). Finland’s President Tarja Halonen is often referred to as Moominmamma– partly ironically, but also out of pride. (The Moomins are a cartoon strip and set of children’s fantasy stories that are as big as Disney in Finland).

In Mubarak’s case, the pharaoh moniker is an insult. It’s shorthand for absolutism, state violence and destruction.

“If we go back four thousand years pharaohs were kings that ruled for life and built grand monuments to themselves,” says Joshua Stacher of Kent State University. “It’s not a good term.”

It wasn’t always that way. A few decades ago, the pharaohs were remembered proudly as demi-gods who “ensured the provision of water to the Egyptian peasants in the Nile Delta and upper Egypt,” says Tarek Osman, author of Egypt on the Brink. That is “an extremely positive role in the deep Egyptian psyche.” Maybe that sense of the pharaohs will return, now that Mubarak is gone.

Check out this post on Language Log for Chinese signs held by protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Were these people protesting Mubarak, or sending a message to China’s Communist rulers?

Also in the podcast, fears for the future of Cantonese, once the lingua franca of many Chinatowns around the world.

Beijing is stepping up its efforts to establish Mandarin as the official tongue of China. As a result, Cantonese is spoken by fewer people — and in fewer situations outside the home — even in Cantonese-speaking parts of China. There have been protests in the cities of Guangzhou and Hong Kong about proposals to expand the use of Mandarin on TV and in other public settings.

In the rest of the world, students of the Chinese language and their teachers see the writing on the wall: they are choosing to learn Mandarin rather than Cantonese.

These days in New York’s Chinatown, a mix of dialects is spoken. That means people often fall back on the common dialect Mandarin. But not Kim Mui. She teaches a Cantonese class. It’s going to take many people like her to ensure that Cantonese survives in the long term.

Finally, British cultural revolutionaries Gang of Four talk about their name, which derives from a group of notorious Chinese cultural revolutionaries. The bandmembers also talk about their new CD, and about phrases that include the word farm.

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