It is not unusual these days to hear about job losses in any number of industries.

But one area that gets little publicity about a shrinking workforce is the real estate business.

It’s not the best of times for that industry, with sales slowing and credit tightening.

Those conditions have convinced many agents to find other work, or at least pray hard for a sale.

New Hampshire Public Radio’s David Darman has more.

Rosemary explains how to distinguish a Northern Harrier (aka Marsh Hawk) from other raptors in the sky.

Word of Mouth producer Avishay Artsy reports back on The New Yorker's "Stories from the Near Future" conference held last week in New York City. The event brought together a number of influential, visionary thinkers from a wide variety of disciplines - scientists and engineers, artists and designers, architects, chefs, politicians, law professors, business leaders... all meeting to discuss the newest research trends and ideas that will shape how we live.

We'll hear from several of the participants, including:

Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, about implementing the nation’s most innovative environmental policies in his city.

David Adjaye, an architect whose work includes London's Idea Stores, the Nobel Peace Center, in Oslo, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, will discuss the newest trends in contemporary architecture.

Jane McGonigal, an alternate-reality game designer and a senior researcher at the Institute for the Future, discusses how game play in virtual worlds can improve problem-solving in the real world.

Yoky Matsuoka, the director of the neurobotics laboratory at the University of Washington, created the first anatomically correct robotic hand.

When you picture a stereotypical detective, it can be hard to shake the image of Sherlock Holmes clutching a big magnifying glass, looking for clues. But these days, if you’re out to solve a tricky crime, you may be better served with a laptop computer than the old-fashioned tools of the trade. Today on Word of Mouth, we meet two men whose detective work revolves around ones and zeroes.

Hany Farid is revolutionizing the field of digital image forensics – that’s the art of telling when a photograph has been faked. Modern technology is making it easier and easier for the average person to manipulate an image, and it’s getting harder and harder to detect the fakes. Hany’s job is to keep up with the technology and create tools that can separate the real from the phony. He’s professor and associate chair of Computer Science at Dartmouth College, and he has an article about his work in the June issue of Scientific American.

We also talk with Richard Mislan, assistant professor of Computer and Information Technology at Purdue University. He recently organized the first-ever Mobile Forensics World Conference in Chicago. It looked at the ways police can glean information from confiscated cell phones to help them solve crimes.

(Photo by József Sasvári)