The clever code takes flat digital images and sows them into a 3D collage. For example, if I’m selling my condo, Photosynth can take some pictures of the apartment and turn them into a full walk-through tour. It recognizes when objects – a sofa, bookcase, doorway – appear in multiple frames and automatically figures out how to overlap the images to give the greatest sense of depth and accuracy. A prospective buyer could then virtually walk around a room, taking it all in from different perspectives.

For the program to work well, it requires a lot of photos of the same thing from different angles. You need at least three photos of any one object to pull off the 3D effect, but Microsoft project architect Blaise Aguera y Arcas told me a few months ago that Photosynth works best when it can churn through hundreds of images. So, if I were selling my place, I might spend a whole afternoon snapping pictures before my tour is worthwhile.

If you want to see Photosynth in action without the time investment, Microsoft has several impressive examples of museums and major landmarks. (Right now, the program only work on PCs.)

Mr. Aguera y Arcas muses about connecting Photosynth to an image service like Flickr. Then, millions of images taken by thousands of people could be compiled into 3D models of popular tourist destinations. Check out his TED talk, where he shows off Photosynth’s rendering of Notre Dame.

Researchers from the University of Delaware have found that by ringing a farm with trees, they could cut off-site ammonia and dust emissions by more than half and odors by nearly 20 percent. So far, the best arrangement appears to consist of a border of broadleaf trees or trees with waxy leaves, enclosed within two additional rows of evergreens. The broadleaves catch the heavy particles during summer, when a farm’s exhaust fans are working hardest. The evergreens scrub the finer particles that get by the first row. In winter, when the broadleaf trees have dropped their foliage, the evergreens do all the scrubbing.

The research began in response to complaints after farms on the Delmarva Peninsula began installing more effective ventilation systems for their poultry houses. The team, led by George Malone with the university’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, spent six years exploring different trees and configurations. To date, roughly 35 percent of the 2,000 poultry farms on the peninsula have planted these tree-based “scrubbers,” Dr. Malone notes.

The team summarized its results Wednesday at the American Chemical Society’s annual meeting in Philadelphia.

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“It’s not really an open process. You’ve got to have bookers that are well networked, and for most indie artists, that’s just not the case,” says Flynn, an Americana singer based in the Northwest.

And yet this spring, there she stood, on a sweltering Bonnaroo stage, surrounded by a festival crowd thick with reporters, label execs, bloggers, and industry cognoscenti. Her ticket to the big show: OurStage.com, a website that allows mid-level artists a chance to post their music and win an assortment of prizes, including cash, gear, and gigs at various big-name concerts across the country.

Ever since Elvis first swiveled his multiplatinum hips, the American pop paradigm has remained the same: record label signs young artists, young artists sell their soul to the label, and never the twain shall part.

Sites like MySpace and PureVolume, which provide a free platform for artists of any caliber, have helped level the playing field to some degree. The Internet, experts often argue, is the great democratizer: It allows artists to disseminate and publish their music on their own terms.

But the Web has also ushered in a sonic traffic jam of monstrous proportions, says Ben Campbell, CEO of the Chelmsford, Mass.–based OurStage. Faced with the prospect of digging through a gazillion middling acts on the Web, many talent scouts resort to traditional channels of recruiting such as word-of-mouth recommendations, thus missing out on those “musicians capable of going to the next level.

“Think about the folks who capture that amazing disaster and post it to YouTube,” Mr. Campbell says. “Those people have no intention of becoming the next Steven Spielberg. Serious musicians, on the other hand, the ones who post their music on the Web – they care a great deal about this, because they’ve just quit their job and are playing shows fulltime. [At OurStage] we’re trying to be a consolidator of the really great artists – the high end of the emerging talent. We have no interest in building a catalog of 2 million musicians.”

OurStage’s frontend is a fairly simple affair: Artists post their music, which is handed over to web-savvy fans for voting. The most popular acts, like Ashleigh Flynn, bubble to the top; in a best-case scenario, they get seen by the right people and scooped up to play festivals such as the Radio 92.9 City Steps Music Series at City Hall Plaza in downtown Boston. (Among this month’s prizes for high-ranking acts: a slot at the visitRaleigh Benefit Concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a mentoring session with Sirius DJ Stefanie Scamardo, and $5,000 in cash.)

“It really has raised the bar on the level of recognition that artists get,” says Flynn. “The people at OurStage are so well networked with the national music business community. MySpace is all self-promotion to some degree; OurStage is a chance to get on and compete among folks in your genre, which is more meaningful.”

Last month, OurStage announced a partnership with LiveNation, the massive concert promotion company based in Los Angeles. The deal, Campbell says, will increase the opportunities for OurStage artists exponentially, by offering them a chance to compete for opener duties at 300 LiveNation concerts.

“At the same time, we have a tool set that allows the artist to communicate directly with the fans, which is harder and harder to do on the big social networks,” he adds, citing an array of Web 2.0 features from live chat sessions to a video feature where fans can request songs.

But significant hurdles remain before OurStage can lay claim to the title of premier music platform. For one, just as there is a glut of artists on the Web, there is a glut of sites like AmieStreet.com, each offering its own “unique” services. And as Mike Worthington, a scouting and artist development executive at the New York label Tommy Boy Entertainment points out, many bands still list their MySpace page as a primary URL.

“Everyone’s figuring out how to monetize these social networks, and of course the new guys are going to talk about why they might be better,” Mr. Worthington says. “There’s a lot out there, and kids are less brand conscious.”

Still, he adds, “We’ve got to give OurStage some props.” He points to one of Tommy Boy’s most recent acquisitions, a Brooklyn-based pop act called Plushgun, which won the attention of the label after charting on OurStage.

“Kids these days seem to be turned on by the live experience of music, rather than the prerecorded setting,” Worthington says. “And OurStage is tapping into that. Because essentially, what we’re looking for first is music that connects to people.”

Converging here at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, these 61 inventors from 20 countries divided into multilingual teams, each drafting and tinkering with their own device that will hopefully make life for the world’s poor a little easier.

There was no grand prize to be won at this second-annual International Development Design Summit (IDDS), but members sometimes skipped meals and stayed up late – sawing, hammering, and welding – to perfect and build their designs.

Soon, their prototypes will be rebuilt and refined in the developing world by artisans using locally available materials and tested ultimately by consumers who live on less than a dollar a day.

While the 10 teams constructed a wide variety of devices – from an inexpensive incubator for low-birth-weight babies to a rope system that could help craftswomen in the Himalayas get their products to market – here are three of the most interesting inventions to emerge from this year’s IDDS:

The charcoal crusher
Each summer, Americans fire up their charcoal grill for an outdoor barbecue.
In many developing countries, charcoal is an everyday fuel and used with indoor kitchen stoves. But the smoke-flavored food carries a health risk.

Charcoal is not clean-burning, and one IDDS team says the resultant indoor pollution has been linked to deaths on the same scale as malaria and tuberculosis globally.

One way to make charcoal produce fewer emissions is to pulverize the charred agricultural waste – like corncobs or crushed sugar cane – and pack it into denser briquettes.

A $2 metal press is already available for crushing powder into charcoal, says Jessica Vechakul, an engineer from MIT. What is missing in the market is a device to crush the burnt cobs into powder – so her IDDS team decided to build one. Their prototype looks like an oversized mouse trap with a hand crank. The user spins the crank and feeds the blackened cobs through a hopper. The grinder drops the powder into a container where it’s mixed with other ingredients into a cookie-dough consistency for briquettes. The simple contraption can crush six pounds of cobs in 10 minutes.

Right now, people who make charcoal from corncobs stomp on bags of burned cobs or beat the sacks with heavy sticks. When they empty the bags, the crusher is momentarily engulfed in a black cloud, inhaling the dust, Vechakul says. Also, after a few stomping sessions, the bags must be replaced – a recurring expense. “It is one messy job,” says Ms. Vechakul.

Bernard Kiwia, a bike mechanic from Tanzania, will take his team’s design to his home country. There, his job will be to persuade rural communities to use the hand-cranked device instead of cutting down trees for fuel. This alternative fuel from agricultural waste might be cheap overall, but, as some rural poor see it, wood costs nothing but time and effort, says Mr. Kiwia.

Unless they understand the huge environmental cost of chopping down trees on a regular basis, those in the countryside have little incentive to switch to a cleaner fuel, he says. Getting the target audience to invest in the IDDS device appears to be toughest part of the design game.

Educational, supercheap computers
Video-game cartridges from the 1980s may strike some as quaint relics from an 8-bit era. But an IDDS team sought to convert the outmoded systems into an inexpensive learning tool for schoolchildren in developing countries.

Computers are prohibitively expensive for many in developing nations. But TV sets are common and could work as a platform for educational games, says Derek Lomas, the design team leader.

Earlier this year in Bangalore, India, Mr. Lomas strolled through a bazaar and noticed an educational video-game system based on the Japanese Nintendo Famicom, for which patents have run out. Just for a lark, he bought the set for $12.50. The generic system came with two game cartridges, a keyboard, and a couple of controllers.

Such a cheap, TV-based computer got his IDDS team brainstorming. Facilities in Ghanaian public high schools are significantly lacking compared with private schools, says teammate and Ghanaian pastor George Fuachie. Some cleverly designed educational software with reasonable price tags could give disadvantaged kids much-needed help and computer training. Off the shelf, this rudimentary computer can run a graphic user interface with a mouse and has some built-in programming capability. The team’s job is to design software appropriate for the classroom.

“It can run 8-bit games like Oregon Trail, Lemonade Stand, PAWS teaches typing, and Number Munchers, which I enjoyed playing as a kid,” says Lomas. Eventually, students could start creating their own locally relevant games on this system. Imagine children in Africa playing ethnic board games like Mancala – or a regional variation – on a television screen, he says.

The team researched hardware modifications to the TV-computer that will enable users to connect to text-only Internet sites – they declare it doable. Within a month, they also assembled a software development kit that makes it easier for open-source developers to produce new games and educational content for the system.

Going from the design concept to a commercial product is the task that lies ahead. When that happens, Lomas can consider his $12.50 investment a decent bargain.

Power generation from everyday chores
Globally, 1.6 billion people have no access to electricity and use fuel lamps or stay in darkness every night. Going about their daytime chores – pumping water, grinding dough, or getting around on bicycles – these off-the-grid people physically exert themselves to run machines. One IDDS team worked on a bit of modern alchemy – converting mechanical energy from everyday labor into stored electrical energy.

Few consumers will labor away to generate electrical power. “But if the effort is incidental as they go about some regular task, people don’t seem to mind putting in that extra 10 percent,” says Jay Pagnis, a mechanical engineering student from India. His team focused on treadle pumps – foot-operated devices used to irrigate farmland in Asia and Africa. Many country farmers step on and off these StairMaster-like contraptions to pump water for an average of four hours a day.

The team’s generator attachment fits in a wooden frame and hooks the pump’s treadle to a turning wheel, which charges a couple of store-bought batteries. After the day’s work, a farmer can unhook the rechargeable batteries and use the power to light a 5-watt compact fluorescent lamp – the equivalent of a regular 25 watt incandescent lamp – for four hours, says Mr. Pagnis.

This may not seem like much, but this lighting is more efficient compared with kerosene lamps currently in use in such places, points out teammate Suprio Das, an Indian electrical engineer. What’s more, this set-up can pay for itself in six months, they say. And, if it breaks down, the mechanism is simple enough to be repaired by a local bike mechanic.

He and Richard Jenkins, an engineer and fellow Briton, designed the “Greenbird” as a carbon-neutral craft capable of sailing four to six times faster than the wind that carries it. With the right breeze, the two hope to blow past 116 miles an hour and into the record books.

The Greenbird is a spindly thing. (more…)

The immediate concern: Will US astronauts be able to ride Russian rockets between 2010, when the last shuttle is retired, and 2015, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration expects to launch a replacement?

Russian spacecraft are how NASA plans to send its astronauts to the International Space Station. But with tensions rising over Russia’s invasion of Georgia and a US-Polish missile deal, some lawmakers and space-policy analysts worry that the US Congress – or Russia itself – could scuttle the plan. If tensions fail to ease over the longer term, the space station could shift from an orbiting laboratory to a geopolitical bargaining chip.

The possibility that international tensions could limit US access to the space station for at least five years “is a real concern,” says Ray Williamson, an analyst with the Secure World Foundation, a space-policy think tank in Superior, Colo. But the notion that the US needs an alternative right away is a bit premature, he adds.

Proposals range from extending the shuttle program beyond 2010 to cutting a deal with China, which is ramping up its own human spaceflight effort. Each option faces big budgetary or political challenges.

Already, Bush administration officials reportedly have suggested that the full range of US-Russian ties need to be reviewed in light of Moscow’s actions in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. Those tensions appeared to have risen another notch Wednesday when US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski inked a deal under which the US would install antiballistic missiles in northeastern Poland.

For the US, the challenge lies in the way the Bush administration crafted its 2004 vision for space exploration. It called for an end to the shuttle program in 2010 and the launch of a replacement, the Ares I and its Orion capsule, by 2015. NASA is working on the Ares I system, along with other major components of its Constellation program, with that deadline firmly in mind. Constellation aims to return humans to the moon by 2020. But that schedule leaves at least a five-year gap with no homegrown way to send astronauts to the space station.

The US endured a nearly six-year gap in human spaceflight between the Apollo and shuttle programs. But this time around, the US has a destination in orbit that it has paid big money to build and maintain.

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has called the gap and the need for Russia’s help “unseemly.” To try to narrow the gap, the agency initially set an internal target for launching Ares 1 with its Orion crew capsule in September 2013. But with more-refined cost estimates in hand, and based on an assumption of no new money likely from Congress to support a 2013 deadline, the agency has moved that internal date to September 2014.

“The space community has been trying to yell about this for years, but people didn’t pay a lot of attention,” says George Whitesides, executive director of the National Space Society, a space-exploration advocacy group in Washington. “The biggest lesson we should have learned” from the shift from Apollo to the shuttle “is the need to think through the transition between vehicles without gaps.”

The first signals about the future may well come from Congress, which is weighing whether to grant NASA a waiver this year from the Iran, North Korea, and Syria Non-Proliferation Act. It did so in 2005 so that NASA could buy astronaut launch services from Russia through 2011. NASA officials have said they need to place their order soon given the lead time the Russians say they to build the new Soyuz capsules NASA would need.

Short of holding its nose and granting the waiver, Congress appears to have few options.

The US could try to play a China card, notes Vincent Sabathier, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and a former official with the French space agency CNES. In an online commentary last week, he noted that China doesn’t represent an immediate solution. But Chinese space officials have expressed an interest in participating in the space-station program, he notes. And tighter links between the US and Chinese space programs could represent important confidence-building measures affecting other areas of US-Chinese ties.

But such a move would require a profound change in US policy that would be a tough sell, especially at this point in the US political cycle, according to Joan Johnson-Freese, a specialist in international space policy who heads the department of national-security studies at the US Naval War College in Newport, R.I.

Thus, if Congress turns its back on a waiver for NASA , “that leaves us in a situation of keeping the shuttle on line,” she says. “Then we’re eating our seed corn once again.” The reason: Unless a new president and Congress give NASA enough money to extend the shuttle program – which already is winding down and likely would require a costly recertification of the remaining shuttles – cash to keep the shuttles running probably would come from money NASA plans to spend on the Constellation program.

At the end of the day, “Congress will act pragmatically” and grant the waiver, predicts Peggy Finarelli, a senior fellow at the Center for Aerospace Policy Research at George Mason University in Fairfax., Va.

While US-Russian relations appear to be growing more rocky, she doesn’t anticipate the space station becoming a bargaining chip for either country. Hearkening back to the Carter administration’s response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and its cancellation of science and technology exchanges in protest, she says that the White House could make that move then because “there was nothing there where you had multibillion-dollar programs where you had invested a lot of your future.”

Moreover, over the past 10 to 15 years, the two countries’ space programs and even their space-launch industries have become tightly intertwined. “These relations are not so easy to damage,” says Mr. Whitesides. That, he says, gives some cause for hope that the space station will remain a symbol of international cooperation in space, despite sometimes rocky relations between partners on Earth.

Until now, researchers in port cities have had a hard time figuring out what proportion of fine sulfate particles come from ships burning high-sulfur bunker oil, compared to the diesel trucks or trains that serve the cities. These fine particles are less than 1-millionth of a meter across. Once inhaled, these particles stay put, researchers say, constituting a potential public-health hazard.

Scientists at the University of California at San Diego found that ships approaching or in port can account for almost half of the fine sulfate particles found over coastal southern California. No one expected ship emissions of these particles to be so high, according to Mark Thiemens, a UCSD biochemist who led the study. The team applied an approach that has been used to tease out sources for other chemicals in the atmosphere.

Combined with wind patterns, the team’s technique allowed it to trace the origin of plumes to locations as far away as the Port of Los Angeles. The technique holds the promise of helping local officials better understand sources of pollution undercutting air quality, the researchers say. In July 2009, California will require ships to shift from bunker fuel to cleaner fuels when they approach within 24 miles of the coast.

The results appear in this week’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Jeremy Jackson at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who made that overview, notes that this is “not a happy picture.”

He says that “the only way to keep one’s sanity and try to achieve real success is to carve out sectors of the problem that can be addressed in effective terms and get on with it as quickly as possible.”

For example, policymakers and governments can work aggressively to get international agreement on sustainable fishing practices that really work. They can vigorously pursue development and implementation of nonpolluting farming.

Change is a way of life in the ocean. It’s been going on since the planet formed. Even the potential mollusk invasion has a long history. Geerat Vermeij with the University of California at Davis and Peter Roopnarine at the California Academy of Sciences traced that history in last week’s issue of the journal Science. Pacific Ocean mollusks were invading the North Atlantic during a relatively warm period 3.5 million years ago. The scientists note that computer-based climate forecasts expect similar conditions to return by 2050 with a nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean.

Millions of years ago, abundant food and stiff competition in the Bering and Chuckchi Seas developed a population of shellfish bigger and tougher than Atlantic animals. These tough guys rode a northward water flow across the ice-free North Pole into the Atlantic. The researchers now have identified at least 77 lineages of equally rugged shallow-water shellfish in the Bering Sea that are ready to make that trip again. They explain that the earlier invasion led to new North Atlantic species but did not cause significant extinctions. They say that a new invasion will also change the makeup of North Atlantic communities. They add: “But whether that will harm local fisheries is an open question. Humans may have to adapt as well.”

Millions of years ago, only nature was at work. Now the human impacts Professor Jackson reviewed last week in the online Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences have become a wild card in the game. Jackson explains that mass extinction does not mean loss of all ocean life.

But key elements of long established healthy food webs such as fish and sharks are disappearing. He warns that intricate food webs that feature large animals are being converted into simplistic ecosystems dominated by microbes, toxic algal blooms, jellyfish, and disease. It’s what the Scripps’ announcement of this research calls the “rise of slime.”

Jackson identifies coral reefs and estuaries and coastal seas that suffer from overfishing and farm runoff as “critically endangered.” Saving these critically endangered ecosystems would be a good place to start the long-term efforts to save the entire ocean from man-made devastation.

The University of Michigan posted its 2008 American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) this morning. Among the six manufacturing and e-business industries, Google and Apple hovered above the competition.

In the search-engine category, Google scored an 87 out of 100 – eight points higher than last year and 9 points higher than No. 2 Yahoo. These ranks come as Yahoo continues to push away from the failed takeover attempt by Microsoft and investor fallout that’s still making headlines. By comparison, Yahoo was one percentage point ahead of Google in last year’s ACSI. There’s still concern that the Microsoft bid distracted Yahoo from developing exciting new products and allowed Google to jump ahead.

Among computer-makers, Apple led the competition with 85 out 100. Second place Dell earned a 75, and, like Yahoo, slid several percentage points since 2007. CNET wondered if Apple benefited from being “the only company that didn’t release a Window Vista PC.” The new Microsoft operating system has been a bit of a black eye for the company – whether fair or not. The ACSI polled consumers before the iPhone release and MobileMe bungling, so those two events had no effect on Apple’s score.

Apple and Google also deserve mention for being the only two breakaway hits in the tech sector. The other four categories all had much tighter competition this year. MSNBC and NYTimes snagged “Internet News” with 76 and 75. Toyota and BMW led “Automobiles” with a pair of 87s. All the “Major Appliance” makers got an even 80.