It’s an unlikely medical device: a sleek smartphone more suited to a nightclub than a rural health clinic. But it’s loaded with software that allows health workers in the remote northernmost Philippines province of Batanes to dramatically reduce the time it takes to get X-rays to a radiologist–and to get a diagnosis for a patient being tested for tuberculosis.

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Two students partnered up to take on the latest Internet fad: the online social networks that were exploding into the mainstream. With people signing up in droves to reconnect with classmates and old crushes from high school, and even becoming online “friends” with their family members, the two wondered what the online masses were unknowingly telling the world about themselves. The pair weren’t interested in the embarrassing photos or overripe profiles that attract so much consternation from parents and potential employers. Instead, they wondered whether the basic currency of interactions on a social network–the simple act of “friending” someone online–might reveal something a person might rather keep hidden.

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Boston City Hall, a drab concrete monument to 1960s Brutalism run by a self-described urban mechanic who despises voice mail, isn’t exactly known as a hotbed of technological innovation.

But within, a few young, tech-savvy aides are trying to drag municipal government into the age of mobile gadgetry.

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Legendary blues guitarist B.B. King had a point when he sang “Never Make Your Move Too Soon.” Just ask Mike Fritz, a Framingham man who helped develop a billion-dollar idea 11 years before its time.

On a trip to Natick Mall during the 2005 Christmas shopping season, Fritz saw someone wielding a plastic toy shaped like a guitar, and having a wonderful time. He was playing Guitar Hero, a new videogame that lets players pretend to be the lead guitarist in a rock band.

Fritz immediately recognized Guitar Hero as a great idea–that’s because he once worked for a company that created a nearly identical game back in 1994.

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There’s lots of talk in the tech industry these days about capitalizing on growth in “emerging markets,” countries like China, Vietnam and Brazil where people are rapidly buying computers and printers.

A story in Monday’s Boston Globe says Hewlett-Packard Co. is taking that strategy one step further: Its printers, writes Farah Stockman, “have become a top seller” in Iran–a country whose economy the U.S. government wants to prevent from emerging.

Since 1995, the U.S. government has had an on embargo on trade between U.S. companies and Iran due to the Iranian government’s “sponsorship of international terrorism and Iran’s active pursuit of weapons of mass destruction,” according to a U.S. Treasury Department fact sheet.

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There’s a fresh dust-up over news headline aggregation going on now in Massachusetts as yet another publisher, in a misguided effort to keep its content in a silo, tries to buck the very nature of the Web. GateHouse Media, which owns 125 local papers across the state, is suing the New York Times Co., parent of the Boston Globe, over the links to GateHouse stories from the Globe’s Web sites.

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Over the past few months, Americans have been hearing the word “depression” with unfamiliar and alarming regularity. The financial crisis tearing through Wall Street is routinely described as the worst since the Great Depression, and the recession into which we are sinking looks deep enough, financial commentators warn, that a few poor policy decisions could put us in a depression of our own.

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Some scientists see their work make headlines. But MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz watched his work become a catch phrase. Lorenz, who died in April, created one of the most beguiling and evocative notions ever to leap from the lab into popular culture: the “butterfly effect,” the concept that small events can have large, widespread consequences. The name stems from Lorenz’s suggestion that a massive storm might have its roots in the faraway flapping of a tiny butterfly’s wings.

Translated into mass culture, the butterfly effect has become a metaphor for the existence of seemingly insignificant moments that alter history and shape destinies. Typically unrecognized at first, they create threads of cause and effect that appear obvious in retrospect, changing the course of a human life or rippling through the global economy.

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Lee Hower lived the quintessential Internet start-up life as an early employee at PayPal and part of the founding team of LinkedIn, the social network for professionals. But three years ago, Hower left Silicon Valley’s heady entrepreneurial scene for what might seem the outer reaches of the tech universe. Last week, when Hower–now a venture capitalist–mingled with entrepreneurs hatching new Web sites, tech company founders looking to hire and about 100 self-identified geeks, he wasn’t in Palo Alto, Calif., or even Boston–he was in an art gallery in downtown Providence, R.I.

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