With these maps, you can see down to the room on campus how many people are logged on. You can even watch someone go from room to room if they have a handheld device that's connected.

This raises some serious privacy issues. But where better than to work these concerns out but on a research campus?

As people talk, text and browse, telecommunication networks are capturing urban flows in real time and crystallizing them as Google's traffic congestion maps.

The plastic bottle we're throwing away every day still stays there. And if we show that to people, then we can also promote some behavioral change.

Like a tracer running through the veins of the city, networks of air quality sensors attached to bikes can help measure an individual's exposure to pollution and draw a dynamic map of the urban air on a human scale, as in the case of the Copenhagen Wheel developed by new startup Superpedestrian.

Phone networks can capture life on our planet.