If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then surely a GigaPan is worth a million. For a little over a year, a team at Carnegie Mellon University has been promoting a camera robot — originally developed by NASA to snoop around Mars — for home-planet use. The unit, which can be used with almost any digital camera, costs just under $300, but the “stitching” software that creates the signature zoom & pan panoramas, is free. Also, unlike Microsoft’s Photosynth, it is compatible with both Mac and Windows. (National Geographic partnered with Microsoft Live Labs to create Photosynth images of global landmarks, which, unfortunately, cannot be viewed from my MacBook.)

The images are stunningly addictive. Like Peter Parker-turned-Spiderman, you’ll find yourself able see farther, deeper and with more clarity than you’d ever imagined. Surprisingly, it doesn’t take long to get past the realization that privacy as we knew it is gone. With police cameras at every intersection, surveillance cameras everywhere else (including the new 5-eyed wonder from Scallop Imaging that takes up about as much space as a light switch) and Google Earth, perhaps we’ve known it’s been gone for while. Now, at least, we get to share the pictures.

Bio photonics. Until yesterday, when a story on Wired magazine’s website about a “MacGyveresque” cell phone lit up Twitter universe, I hadn’t a clue. This particular cell phone, developed by Aydogan Ozcan’s lab at UCLA, doubles as a cytometer that can analyze blood cells for disease based on the cells’ light diffraction signatures. In short, rapid diagnostics literally at the speed of light in a portable package that fits in the palm of one’s hand. And as a cherry on the good news sundae, all the physical parts — an LED, a webcam, the phone itself — are off the shelf and cheap.

The implications for public health, particularly in poor developing countries, are, of course, enormous. This also has the potential to be a game-changer across the board, putting a “lab” in every doctor — or community health worker’s — pocket, dramatically reducing the time and cost of tests. Imagine: health-care costs that go down.  (Although, as my colleague Ed Jezierski at InSTEDD points out, if it turns out that proprietary component of the test is expensive, the bargain disappears.)

The Wired story was grouped on TrackerNews with a Technology Review article providing a more detailed explanation of the imaging system (which can also be used for testing water):

The search for good links for TrackerNews has been an adventure. Why should “bots” have all the fun crawling the web for tasty content? Those over-achiever algorythmic bits of code will catch on to what I’ve been doing soon enough. For now, there is room for all in the cyber-universe.

TrackerNews could be described as a sort of artisanal aggregator. Content isn’t driven by datelines, but  contextual relevance (a nod to Alta Haggarty for that wonderful phrase). It is about creating an interesting mix and match, grouping stories (breaking news, research, blog posts, websites, book reviews, e-books, in print, audio, video) to deepen understanding and/or make it easier to see connections.

TrackerNews is also not limited by RSS feeds. No matter how many feeds one gathers, there is always much more to be mined from the web. Also, most feeds skew toward breaking news, or what’s popular. Tracker mixes it up a bit more, often featuring lesser-known stories (research abstracts, for example, or a flashback to an older article). This isn’t to say that I don’t scan RSS feeds early and often – they’re darn useful. But Tracker is trying to do something a little different.

Last night, I posted a record 12 links on a single topic on TrackerNews: a dozen stories from around the world about efforts to thwart a free press. I could easily have posted more. Here is what made the cut:

• A story about Russia’s efforts to recast Stalin as a hero. In a recent raid, computer hard-drives full of inconvenient documentation to the contrary were carted off from the offices of a human rights group. Also, a new treason law that not only threatens media, but any NGO that maintains an office in Russia.

A few days ago, I posted a suite of “green bar” links on TrackerNews about soil health and farming that includedNational Geographic piece— “Our Good Earth” —by Charles Mann.

Mann starts out describing in great detail just  how stunningly bad things are: 7.5 million acres degraded worldwide from compaction, erosion and deforestation (according to the most comprehensive report of its kind, which is now 17 years old…). From America’s breadbasket in the Midwest where $400,000 satellite-guided tractors literally take the breath out the soil by squeezing out all the air, to wrong-headed one-size-fits-all Maoist farm policies turned the Loess Plateu, one of the most fertile places on the planet, into “arguably the worst soil erosion in the world,” it is a devastating picture of agricultural folly.