10. 9-11 Oral Histories Saved and Shared via Smart Phone

The terrorist attacks against the United States in September of 2001 left a lasting impression on the country and changes that came from that moment rippled out across the globe. We humans use whatever we can to understand what we've gone through and this year, mobile technology grew in leaps and bounds. It was inevitable that we used that technology to address our own feelings on the 10th anniversary of the attack.

Broadcastr, a Brooklyn-based mobile start-up, has struck an agreement with National September 11 Memorial and Museum to make 50 oral histories of first-responders available via smart phone and online.

When Broadcastr leaves beta In February, it will welcome the collection of additional cell-recorded oral histories it is hoping users will gather. Interviewers can also geolocate the interview.

9. Mapping the Dead Zones

As our population continues to increase and, as a species, we continue to claw at the world, technology keeps pace in an attempt to understand and roll back the damage.

The World Resources Institute and the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences have teamed to create an interactive map of eutrophication and hypoxia in the world's coastal areas.

There are 530 areas identified as suffering from low oxygen - that's hypoxia - and 228 more suffering eutrophication, or excessive fertilization, usually from run-off. Identifying problem spots is job one for anyone hoping to slow, stop or reverse these sorts of marine declines.

8. New Software Helps Rebuild Ancient Cities

The natural world is not the only victim of our weight on the planet. Our own cultural patrimony and history suffers from neglect and abuse. Added to that, time, which is an intrinsic part of the environment, does nothing beneficial to the artifacts of our societies. But academics are hoping that advances in the sensitivity and data capacity of new technology will allow them to rebuild, in mind if not in fact, the physical remains of our past, specifically, the buildings that defined our relationship to the world. It's an effort, as it were, to resurrect our ancestors from their footprints.

The first step in virtualizing a building is tracing it. That's a tough and time-consuming activity. It can be creative but it can also produce inaccuracies. Now scientists at the University of East Anglia have developed a software that can capture and restore destroyed buildings from old maps.

Professor Stephen Laycock and his team have created a tool that will automatically extract dimensions and relationships from colored maps. Users can extract black and white maps by directing a cursor within the building's mapped edges.

7. Using 3D Printing to Repair Rodin's Thinker

3D printing is increasing in popularity as it decreases in cost. Makers fairs are increasing in frequency and small personal 3D printers are a bit more common, in offices, if not at the kitchen table. But it's still largely the purview of dedicated companies. In 2010, Dutch firm Materialise worked with Egypt's Council of Antiquities to "print" a picture-perfect Tut for traveling exhibits.

This year, Cornell University has begun to employ it to create safe-to-handle exact replicas of cuneiform, the ancient Near Eastern writing system, used on now-fragile clay tablets. But Materialise's experience repairing the famous Thinker sculpture by the French sculptor Rodin, is a good picture of the so-what of 3D.

In 2007, the Singer Laren Museum in the Netherlands, where The Thinker resided, was burglarized. The meatheads who broke in did so not to steal the art, but to steal the metal. They made off with seven sculptures and started to try to chop them up to sell for scrap.

The Singer Laren needed to figure out how to deal with the butchered figure. iMaterialise had an idea. They did a CT scan of the damaged figure. Then they scanned the original mold retained by the Musee Rodin in Paris. They printed out a full-sized copy from the original on their Mammoth 3D printer. The conservators at the Singer Laren have used that and the scans of the original to re-fabricate and lay in the missing and damaged parts of the statue.

6. Using Twitter to Preserve Minority Languages

Languages, like rain forests, have the potential to contain answers to questions we may not even have had to form yet, or information that will guide us or remedies for what ails us. But the same technological tools that allow us to throw our voices halfway across the world - television, film, telephones - have pressured us to use the same language to exercise it. Centralization has meant standardization.

But new communications technologies, the social web and its mobile technology, may have provided us with an avenue back to Babel. (It can be a confusing, clamorous place, but it offers a fecundity that homogeneity does not.)

Of the approximately 6,000 languages alive in the world today, 60 percent or more are said to be dying out. The majority of the world's languages are, in fact, "minority" languages, used in the shadow of a more politically powerful tongue.

On St. Patrick's Day, Prof. Kevin Scannell of St. Louis University launched a project called Indigenous Tweets. Using a web-crawling statistical software he wrote called An Crúbadán, Scannell identifies which minority languages are being tweeted, by whom and how.

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