Normal Room is a really interesting idea for making the world a smaller place: provide a space for people to upload pictures of their houses and associate location information with it. Unfortunately, the international character of the variety of rooms is leavened by a healthy dose of universal geek-itude. I’m sorry, but anyone with an oscilloscope in their room does not qualify for the sobriquet, “normal room.”

The Environmental Protection Agency wants you to know what nasty chemicals are lurking in an abandoned lot near you, and will be making their data available to the likes of Google and Yahoo! for their mapping applications.

The Cartifact project maps the presence of homeless people in Los Angeles with wierd, semi-organic effects.

Superconductors that can be used at reasonable temperatures have moved out of the laboratory and into the factory. By 2020, high temperature superconducting materials are expected to be price competitive with copper wire. [geekpress]

Sun Microsystems employs a large proportion of remote workers. To deal with the inevitable difficulties of combining present and telepresent workers in the same meeting, they’ve developed the porta-person, a device with a screen, stereo speakers, and a motor that allows it to swivel towards speakers in the room. [futurewire]