Christina Hu / Reuters

In this file photo, cars travel on a main road in a traffic jam at the second ring road in Beijing.

Traffic blows. It's unhealthy and a waste of time. It is also a fact of life in almost every major city around the world, especially in fast-developing China where as many as 20 million rural farmers migrate to the cities each year looking for jobs and a better life.

To help urban planners determine where to build new roads, subways, skyscrapers and shopping malls to absorb their new residents, researchers are turning to data collected by GPS systems in taxicabs.

"Most taxicabs in Beijing have been embedded with a GPS sensor when they were built for the purpose of dispatching and management," Yu Zheng with Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, explained to me in an email.

(Msnbc.com is a joint venture with Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

The taxicabs also carry a sensor that lets dispatch know when a passenger is on board. The combined data paints a picture of where, when and how people travel around the city. 

Zheng and his colleagues gained access to this Big-Brother-like dataset for 30,000 taxicabs spanning the years 2009 and 2010 and analyzed it with computers. 

The results point out well-known flaws in urban planning such as busy business and entertainment districts with inadequate roads and subway lines as well as local knowledge including detours cabbies take to avoid known choke points at rush hour.

"Essentially, GPS-equipped taxicabs can be viewed as ubiquitous sensors constantly probing a city's rhythm and pulse such as traffic flows on road surfaces and city-wide travel patterns of people," reads a paper Zheng presented at the 13th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing earlier this month. 

The comparison of 2009 to 2010 data highlights where urban planning is working or not. For example, the data shows how a newly constructed road in one part of the city eased traffic congestion for people trying to access a highway.

Despite the improvements, the number of regions experiencing traffic headaches increased and some of the snarls that were occurring in 2009 still exist, Zheng noted.

The good news for Beijing dwellers is that urban planners are on top of some of these problems. An analysis of these plans shows, for example, that the construction of two new subway lines will solve a well-known traffic problem in the densely populated residential Wangjing area of the city.

To date, the researchers have been able to identify where the traffic flaws are. In coming months, they plan to analyze the reason behind the flaws such as why people are traveling where and when they do. 

In the future, Zheng said, the team hopes to apply this approach to other cities. That could be good news to residents everywhere from Mexico City to Johannesburg and many points in between that show up in the 2011 iteration of IBM's Commuter Pain Index.

[Via Technology Review]

More stories on traffic and technology:

• Mexico City traffic is worst, drivers survey says
• Where do commuters hurt the most?
• Smartphones to ease traffic snarls
• How wireless devices are used to fight traffic
• IBM to help UAE monitor traffic

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Asaf Tsoar of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the daughter of Prof. Ran Nathan hold one of the bats used in the study of how these mammals are able to "home in" on their designated target sites even from great distances.

Tiny and lightweight GPS units are giving researchers a new way to track small critters, a breakthrough that could open our eyes anew on the mysterious wonders of nature.

For example, a team of Israeli researchers recently outfitted Egyptian fruit bats with GPS units that weigh less than a half ounce (10 grams) to gain clues on how the free-ranging mammals find their way around each night to feed at specific trees, often dozens of miles away from their caves.

The units consist of a GPS receiver that is smaller than a penny coupled with a data logger that weighs 8 grams. The data is downloaded upon recapture, or wirelessly up to 500 meters away.

The tiny GPS units allowed the researchers to step outside the lab and conduct experiments in the complex landscape the animals navigate on a nightly basis.

Their findings show the mammals carry around an internal cognitive map of their home range based on visual landmarks such as lights or hills, according to a paper in the August 15 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Although lab experiments based on distances of a meter or two had hinted at the existence of an internal map for navigation, this study is the first to show that such mammals as fruit bats use these maps to find their way around areas 100 km in size," notes a press release on the study.

This is far from the first use of GPS to track wildlife. Collars outfitted with the technology are routinely used to study larger animals, including coyotes, jaguars and polar bears.

GPS technology is also used to track students who skip class, sex offenders, and, secretly, the cars of citizens.

But as the systems get smaller, smaller animals can be studied with GPS, which might be easier than the currently available radio transmitters used to track the movements of critters such as dragonflies and songbirds.

More stories on wildlife tracking:

• Songbirds migrate faster than thought
• Dragonflies migrate just like birds
• Roaming coyotes can't outfox GPS collars
• Polar bear cubs die as ice melts, swims get longer
• Oldest known wild jaguar in the U.S. is euthanized

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.